The Unexpected Expected

Some at church, all campuses, if you'll remain standing with me as we listen to God's Word. On the day of Jesus' resurrection, two of Jesus' disciples were going to a village named Emmaus. And they were talking with each other about all these things that had happened. And as they did, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were blinded from recognizing him. And he said to them, what are you talking about?

And they stood still looking sad. Then one of them named Cleopas answered him, are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know the things that have happened? And he said to them, what things? And they said to him, concerning Jesus of Nazareth, the man who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.

Yeah, and besides all this, it's now the third day since these things happened. Moreover, some women of our company amazed as they were at the tomb early this morning. And when they didn't find his body, they came back saying that they'd seen a vision of angels who said that he was alive.

Some of those who were with us went to the tomb and found it just like the women had said, but him they did not see. And he said to them, the old foolish ones and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory and beginning with Moses and all the prophets. He interpreted to them and all the scriptures, the things concerning himself.

What an incredible impromptu sermon this must have been as Jesus went through the entire Old Testament and showed how every story, every picture, every promise, every regulation, every ritual, every command all pointed to him. He was the faithful husband in Hosea, refusing to give up on his people even after they betrayed him again and again. The obedient prophet who, unlike Jonah, preached salvation willingly to God's enemies.

And instead of being resentful of God's mercy toward them, wept tears of compassion over them, voluntarily plunging himself into the sea of God's judgment to save them. He was the suffering servant of Isaiah, wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. He was the faithful shepherd king like David, who defeated the giant of death all alone. While we stood on the sidelines and watched the kinsman redeemer of Ruth, ransoming his family, the Passover land presented by Moses, the despised brother like Joseph, who transformed his betrayal into salvation for his treacherous family. The miraculous son of Abraham providing himself on the altar of sacrifice in our place. He was the ark into which we flee for shelter from God's judgment.

The conquering descendant promised to Adam and Eve, who would crush the deceiving serpent underneath his feet. All these things fulfilled so beautifully by Jesus. Yet still, yet still they missed him. They missed him. Let's pray together. Father, we give you thanks that Jesus came just as promised. But God, we recognize that we're not better than these disciples were.

And just like they missed him, just like they were confused by him. So we also, many of us miss him and many of us are very confused by him, why he came as he did. So God, I pray that the same Jesus who explained these things and their hearts burned within them as they did, would be here today speaking so that our hearts would burn within us.

I pray, God, that the Spirit would give understanding and wisdom. And we thank you for your presence here, God, at all of our campuses. We sense it.

We believe it. And we're ready to hear from you. Show us, God. We're ready to listen. We pray in Christ's name. In Christ's name, Amen. Summit Church, you may be seated. You may be seated. If you have your Bible, I'd love for you to take it out and open it to the Gospel of Matthew, the first book of the New Testament, Chapter 1.

I hope you do have your Bible. I hope you bring it with you each week, each weekend here. For those of you that are just coming back from the summer, welcome back. I also myself am coming back from the summer.

I was here for a few minutes last weekend, but this is my first week back preaching. My family was gone for seven weeks this summer, visiting some of our church planters overseas. The trip was basically divided into two sections. One section was we were in South Africa, where we spent about half of our time there in Johannesburg with some of our church planters who worked there. And then the other half would be in what I would just describe as the African bush, where we camped out with some of former members of our church who have an incredible ministry over there. Just imagine African bush. We had bag showers.

You know what that is, where you heat water, and you put it in a bag, and it kind of drips on you, and that's how you clean yourself. We would get up in the morning, our family, and just walk, literally, with them walk a certain direction until we came to a hut. And we would say through a translator, My name is JD.

This is my family. We're from America. Have you heard about Jesus?

Because we would like to tell you about Him. And then that afternoon, we invited Him to a vacation Bible school we were doing, and then that night to some evangelistic meetings. It was an amazing, amazing experience. That was also where my son got bit by a jaguar, which is probably not as bad as it sounds because it was at a petting zoo, but still. In fact, I brought a little picture of him showing off his wound. I said, From now on, anytime you meet a girl for the rest of your life, that's your opening line.

Hi, I got bit by a jaguar. So it was awesome. Then the second half was in Central Asia, where we lived in a large city downtown, and we're just part of the city life there in Central Asia. Worked with a lot of Syrian refugees throughout that time. It was a life-changing experience for us, just to be able to be back on the front lines. I probably shared more one-on-one Jesus with people than I have in a year here, not counting what I do on the weekend. It was amazing, but we have been looking forward to being back. We come back with renewed vision. We come back with, I think, reignited faith, and we're excited about what God has in front of the Summit Church in the days to come. Matthew 1 is where we're going to begin into the New Testament. We're going to begin in what you will probably think of as an unusual place, but we're going to begin there because, as we just saw through Luke 24, Jesus came just like He had promised He would come. All these pictures were so beautifully and perfectly fulfilled in Him, yet still the disciples missed Him because His coming was so unusual, so unexpected, that they didn't recognize Him even when He fulfilled all the symbols and performed all the miracles, which is why, I believe, the manner in which Matthew opens up the New Testament is so important because Matthew, in a sense, is going to give you Jesus' resume. That's how you should read Matthew 1, Jesus' resume. He's going to show you why Jesus came the way that He did. He's going to show you why Jesus is uniquely qualified to be our Savior and why He came in a way that was so confusing. Most of us plow right over Matthew's introduction.

We skim read it without realizing the significance of what He's doing. Let me actually read it here for us, Matthew 1, verse 1. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac was the father of Jacob, and Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers, and Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, Perez was the father of Collection. Hezron was the father of Rand, Rand was the father of Menedab, Menedab was the father of insurance, and Frederic was the father of Salmon who swam upstream against God's enemies. Verse five, and Salmon was the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz was the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse and Jesse the father of David the king, and David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, and Solomon, the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam, and the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, He was the father of Jasam, Jesaph, and Jezebat. And now, Jerm the father of Uzziah, Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Vschez, and he's the father of Hezekiah, Hezekiah the father of Manasseh and Manasseh the father of Amos, Amos the father of Josiah, and Josiah the father of Jeconiah and his brothers at the time of the ortation of Babylon. And after the deportatation of Babylon, Jeconiah was the father of Shiltal, Shiltal was the father of Zerubbabel, Turkey was the father of Abiad, and Abiodah was the father of Eliakim, Eliakim the father of Azure, and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadoh the father of Hakeem, Menachim, the father of Eliud, and Eliud, the father of Eleazar. Eleazar, the father of Matan, and Matan, the father of Jacob.

Jacob, the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ. So, all the generations from Abraham to David were 14 generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon, 14 generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ, 14 generations, amen? Amen, all right, let's close in prayer. No, just kidding. All right, be honest, how many of you zoned out during that reading of the sacred text?

Be totally honest, put your hand up, and say like, I did not. Call yourselves serious Christians, committed Christians. I know that's very unusual, and I know that very few of you stay with me, and probably would not point to this passage as your favorite and most meaningful passage of scripture. But I read it because this genealogy is the key to understanding who Jesus really was, and why he had to come in the confusing way that he did. Notice, verse one, that Matthew is gonna call his whole gospel the book of the genealogy.

In other words, all the rest of the gospel of Matthew is an explanation of what he introduces in the first 17 verses. Then he points out at the end the organization pattern, and that's important too. He says there are three sets of 14 generations. Now, 14 is two sevens, and seven is the biblical number of completion, or perfection. It's pretty obvious, by the way, that he left some generations out in how he put these together.

That was a very commonly accepted practice in those days, so he's not trying to pull the wool over your eyes. But he presents it in this way, according to these three sets of 14, to show that God has superimposed his perfection. He has superimposed his perfect 14, if you will, onto world history, shaping it entirely and perfectly around Jesus.

History, as I've heard it said before, is his story, which is number one. Matthew is trying to show you that though it often does not seem so, Jesus is the center of history. When Matthew wrote this, and when the people that he wrote it to first read it, none of the major actors in world history were paying any attention to Jesus. Jesus was born to an obscure family in a small backwater Middle Eastern country. Nobody in Rome or Athens, where the action really was, was taking any notice of these things.

And when Jesus died, very few people outside of Israel had even heard Jesus's name. Yet Matthew shows you that despite what it looks like on the surface, God is guiding all of history according to his perfect plan in perfect 14s with Jesus Christ right in the center. And what that means for Matthew in his day and what it means for us in our day is that despite what it looks like on the surface, the powers of the world, those who think they control everything are really an illusion. In those days, it seemed like Rome was in charge. But Matthew says, no, this is the center. This is what is happening. In fact, everything that Rome is doing feeds back into this story where Jesus is the center.

I'll give you one quick example of that. One of the details that most people know about the birth of Jesus is that Mary and Joseph, Jesus's earthly parents, had to travel to Bethlehem when Mary was great with child because Caesar Augustus had decided the whole world should be taxed and everybody needed to go to their hometown to be counted where they could pay the tax. And so Mary and Joseph were from Bethlehem and they traveled to Bethlehem. But the gospel writer explains that God's purpose in that was because Micah had made a prophecy, Micah 5, 2, that the Messiah was going to be born in Bethlehem and that needed to be fulfilled. So think about that for just a minute. God taxed the whole world to move two people 90 miles so that you and I would have further proof that God was behind the birth of Jesus. It looks like on the surface that Rome or Washington or New York City or Hollywood is in charge, but that's just an illusion.

The book of Proverbs explains the king's hand is like a river in the hand of the Lord and then he turns it whatever way he chooses and the way he chooses to turn it is in pursuit of the great commission with Jesus at the center. Y'all, stop freaking out about this election. Yes, I've been gone and I come back in and I'm like, who passed out the crazy pills? And I realize you're like, oh, we got two terrible candidates. I don't know who to choose from.

One's a phony and one's a liar and I don't even know which one is which. It's the end of the republic. Y'all, yes, elections are important, but God is not dependent on Washington to fulfill his purposes. He weaves all of this back into his perfect 14 so that at the end, Jesus reigns and Jesus comes. A sign of Christian maturity is when you begin to understand that in everything God does, in everything, whether we're talking about major movements in world politics or we're talking about the particular details of your life, that this is what he is pursuing. When I was overseas, one of our missionaries said, and I thought this was profound, he said, the great test for our generation is whether they will recognize God's hand in the refugee crisis as the rearranging of the nations for the purposes of the Great Commission.

That's the big test. And then he quoted Acts 17, 27. God determines the allotted periods and the boundaries of the dwelling places of the nations on earth. Why?

What does he do with them? He wants them to be able to seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Now, let me be clear. This is not a political statement about what our government should do about refugees.

I am not saying, oh, throw out our immigration system and let everybody in. Our government is charged with keeping things orderly and safe and we need to pray for them to have wisdom in doing so. What I am saying is, can we, as the people of God, recognize the hand of God in what is happening and know what we are supposed to do regardless of how the situation got in there in the first place? One of the things that we did overseas was we worked with Syrian refugees. And one of the Syrian refugees that our teams worked with over there who had come to faith in Christ made this statement and I thought it was so beautiful and moving that I wrote it down word for word.

Listen to this. He said, I thank God, I thank God for the war in Syria and the many terrible things that happened in my life because God used them to bring me to a saving knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Maybe we couldn't get to him in Syria.

Maybe we weren't able and we wouldn't have been able to so God brought him out to a place where we could get to him. Will we recognize in this moment what we are supposed to do because we recognize that what God does in world history, he does for the purposes of the Great Commission. Again, a sign of spiritual maturity in your life is when you begin to recognize that everything that God does in world politics or the details of your life are in pursuit of the Great Commission with Jesus at the center. What if you begin to evaluate when God reshapes your allotted times and the boundaries of your dwelling place that he's doing it so that other people can seek God?

Maybe you get assigned to a job you didn't want. Sure, you can be unhappy about it but you can still look for God once for you in that job or maybe your house didn't sell because God still has purposes for you where you are. Maybe the pain gives you the ability to relate to others going in that same situation so that you can share Jesus with them in a more meaningful way. A sign of spiritual maturity is when you begin to say about all things, why did God give me this for the purposes of the Great Commission, for the purposes of Jesus, the blessings in your life. Maybe you're at a place in your life where you can retire early and maybe God gave you the ability to retire early not so that you could travel around the world playing golf in different countries. Not just that, that's fine but maybe he freed up the best chapter of your life which is when you're the most mature and most unfettered so that you could use the gifts that God has given you strategically on mission for the Great Commission somewhere. Maybe God made you wealthy. I mean, maybe he made you fabulously wealthy and maybe the wealth that he gave you was not just so that you could enjoy the blessings that come from wealth although he doesn't begrudge you that at all. Maybe he gave you that as a stewardship because he was putting resources in your hands for just this time so that you could be a blessing to peoples around the world so that they could begin to seek God. What if you begin to look at everything like Jesus and the Great Commission were at the center?

A sign of spiritual maturity, I'll say it one more time, is when you begin to view everything in your life, every blessing, every teardrop, every heartache as according to God's perfect 14 and how it can be used to help the Great Commission, the mission of Jesus which brings me to point number two. Matthew shows us that God is working even in the chaos and the junk of your life. This genealogy is unusual because typically genealogies only listed out the father's names. That's the way they kept record. But Matthew fills this genealogy with the names of women as well as he includes all these little what seemed like superfluous details that are just sort of, for example, verse three, Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar. Now in the genealogy, only Perez's name is essential. The reason that he mentioned Zerah and Tamar is because he wants you to think about that story. So here's the question, do you know the story that goes with Judah and Perez and Zerah by Tamar?

The story is found in Genesis 38. There's a man named Judah and Judah has three sons. One of his sons, his oldest son, is married to a girl named Tamar. But his oldest son, Judah's oldest son dies, leaves Tamar as a widow before they can have children. And so, in those days, the law was that if your brother died and his wife didn't have children, that you were supposed to take his wife into your house and you were supposed to give him children through her and that's the way you would continue the family line. So Onan, who is the second brother, doesn't want, doesn't like Tamar or doesn't want the hassle of kids or something, so he just refuses to have kids with her so God gets mad and kills him. By the way, I'm giving you such a tame, moderated version of this story.

I feel really, really proud of myself right now. This is, let's just put it, this is not the kind of chapter you wanna read around the table for family devotions. Let's just say that. I had a friend who bought one of his like six year old, five and six year old kids one of these dramatized audio Bibles that you could just play. So he'd turn it on at night for them to listen to. They come down the next morning and like, Dad, you're not gonna believe the stories we heard last night, Genesis 30. Starts to tell this story and his wife says, he says, that's it, no more Bible at bedtime. We're all iPad and games from this point out.

This is such a tame dev version. Anyway, so Onan doesn't want to, you know, so God kills him. So now the custom is Tamar's supposed to go to the third son, right? But Judah, the dad is like, okay, this girl Tamar's been married to two of my sons and they're both dead. I'm starting to think this girl's bad luck.

So I don't wanna, you know, kill my third son. So he stalls and like, you know, oh, I can't pay for the wedding. Well, Tamar gets really ticked off about this because she figures out, you know, I'm never gonna get married and never gonna have kids.

And so she take matters into her own hands. So she goes to the place one night where Judah likes to go to the bar and waits till, you know, he gets a little tipsy. She's dressed like a prostitute.

She's got on her tight jeans and her clear heels. And after he gets tipsy, she gets him crunk and then seduces him to sleep with her. He doesn't realize it's his daughter-in-law because, you know, he's so crunk. So they sleep together and she gets pregnant with Perez and Zerah. Okay, so three months go by, she starts to show that she's pregnant. So Judah says, my daughter-in-law's pregnant. She obviously got pregnant out of wedlock.

Doesn't realize it's his babies, of course. So she's gotta be stoned. So they dragged this girl out to stone her. And right before they stoned her, she reaches inside of her pocket book and says, wait, I've got the belt of the man whose babies they are.

And she pulls out Judah's belt. Now talk about an awkward moment, right? And she was like, well, you know, so how do you think dinner around the Thanksgiving table went for their family that year, by the way? You feeling better about your family yet? This is some messed up stuff.

I mean, we're talking, God, here's what Matthew's trying to show you. God arranges even all of this messed up dysfunctional stuff into his perfect 14. And I share that because there's a lot of you that got some messed up dysfunctional families of your own.

Isn't that right? I mean, everybody's family's a little messed up once you really dig into it. But there are some of you, you look back in your history, like, oh, you just don't understand the home I came out of. Let me be clear, I am not saying that God was pleased with the pain that came into your life. He was broken hearted by that pain.

He's a perfect father. And I get angry when somebody hurts one of my kids. God is angry when somebody hurts one of his. But what you should see is that God has one overriding purpose in your life and God stamps his perfect 14 on even the chaotic mess of your life. We often compare life here to a tapestry. Tapestry's a rug that looks like a beautiful design.

Not one strand is out of place. Flip it over on the back and it looks like this chaotic mess of where all these threads are going. Life often feels like we're in this chaotic mess where these random things are happening. What's gonna happen, Matthew shows you in eternity, is God flips it over and all of a sudden you see it's a perfect picture when not one molecule, not one strand was out of place. Charles Spurgeon, the 19th century British pastor, used to describe it like this. He would say, life for us is like walking into the back of a theater where there's a three hour stage play going on, catching about two minutes of that play and then walking out and saying it doesn't make any sense because nothing that's happening makes sense.

He says, of course it doesn't make sense. It was a three hour stage play, you just got two minutes. I mean, I'm 43 years old. That means that my adult life is what, 20, 25 years?

In my adult life and that's a nanosecond in a five hour movie. Of course there are a lot of things that feel random and chaotic. What Matthew is showing you is it felt random and chaotic to them. It didn't feel like, yeah, we're in the middle of the bloodline of the Messiah.

But God took all of this. He took all this chaotic mess and he arranged it into his perfect 14, not one generation, not one strand was out of place. Here's the third thing he shows you, number three. He shows you that the gospel is for the outsider.

The gospel for the outsider. Another thing that you notice about this genealogy is how many people are listed who have very embarrassing stories. The kind of people you don't want others to know are in your family.

We've all got people like that, right? I really wouldn't prefer for people to know that they're related to me. Many of you have asked me why my family spells our last name Greer in the creative way that we do. If you don't know, it's G-R-E-E-A-R. It's three vowels. And people always point that out to me like I've never noticed that. Oh, you got an extra vowel. Oh, thanks for pointing that out. I've never known that even though I've had the name for 43 years.

But they, I'm pointing, they're like, why don't you spell like a normal person? So I was like, so I always said that the extra vowel was a sign of Scottish royalty. That's not true at all, but it sounded good. So I made it up. We had a girl that worked for our church or went to our church who used to work for one of those ancestry places. And she came to me after service one day and she said, hey, I had a free hour at work and I did some research on your family name. I found out some really interesting things.

Would you like to know? And I said, actually, no, I wouldn't. And she said, well, I'm gonna tell you anyway. She said, so I was able to trace your lineage.

It's really clear. She says, it goes back, the first Greer to come here in your line was Shadrack Greer in 1735. Shadrack Greer was his name. But he spelled his last name, G-R-E-E-R, the way a normal person would. And that goes all the way down to about 1840, she said. And in 1840, inexplicably, it changes from E-E-R to E-E-A-R. She said, now I talked to some of the people where I work, that is always an indication that somebody is trying to run from the law. And so they wanted to keep their last name, so they put an extra vowel in it so the law couldn't track them. She said, the good news is, you come from a line of criminals, right? So that's not the kind of thing that you typically are excited about people knowing about your family line. Here, what Matthew does is he shows you that four women, all of whom have a shady past, are going to be a part of Jesus' line.

And just in case you miss the fact that there are these chaotic stories, he puts in detail, so you'll think about it. We've already talked about Tamar, the seductive daughter-in-law, who sounds more like a character from a made-for-HBO drama than she would a great granny of Jesus. Verse five, you got Rahab, another prostitute. The second prostitute in Jesus' line, a Gentile that God saves from Jericho. Then you got Ruth, remember her?

We went over her story. Then you've got the Moabite homeless girl. Verse six, you got David and the wife of Uriah. Why would he say wife of Uriah and not just give her name? Her name is Bathsheba. Well, because he's trying to make you think of the story. She's not just Bathsheba, she was David's best friend's wife.

And David slept with her and then had Uriah killed to cover it up. He's wanting to make sure you think about that as you read this resume. What is more striking about this is that in those days, your genealogy functioned as your resume. So back then, like today, resumes were fudged to make sure you include the best parts and you omit the unflattering details. You know, they say there's an art to writing a resume where you brag without actually looking like you're bragging. Those of you that are younger in college, you get that, right, you gotta learn to write a resume so that you brag but not look like you're bragging.

Nobody, nobody explained that to me when I wrote my first resume. My first resume for a ministry job, I thought it was supposed to be an essay about how awesome I was. It was 17 pages long.

I kid you not, it was 17 pages long. I listed every place I'd ever spoken, all the awesome things anyone had ever said about me. I got the job miraculously, and I'm still your pastor today. No, this was somewhere else. I got the job and the guy, the supervisor, after I'd been there a few months, he said, man, he goes, yeah, I'm not gonna lie to you, your resume made quite an impression.

He said, we passed it around, we laughed about it for several weeks. But in those days, they had less shame. So when you became a ruler, or when you were campaigning for the job, you would publish your resume to show how your bloodline qualified you for the position by being nothing but a string of awesome. We got a great example, by the way, from the time of Jesus. Herod, who was the king when Jesus was born, published his genealogy. But it was missing anybody who was at all unimpressive or shady. So Matthew, perhaps in response to Herod, includes a bunch of people in Jesus's genealogy that would not have helped his case for being king.

And just in case you miss how shady they are, he makes sure he puts the details in so you'll think about it. It's filled with moral failures and mess ups. The broken and the weak. Those outside of the circles of power. Moral outsiders like Judah, David, whose lineage to Jesus includes an adulterous affair. You got ethnic outsiders like the Gentile Rahab.

You got social outsiders like Ruth. And all that is supposed to give you a very clear message. Jesus came to include you. No matter what your past is, or no matter who you are, he came to include you in his family. He is the redeemer.

You see, a friend of mine says it like this. These names are included in the line that leads to Christ so that you and I can be assured that our names can be included in the line that leads from Christ. Christ coming as king, perfect king, would have crushed us. Had Jesus actually come as the fair judge to repay all evil the way these disciples wanted, that would have left us all without hope. But a Christ that came with the blood of adulterers and murderers and Gentiles flowing in his veins, that's a God who can identify with us and save us. He took our sins and our sorrows, we say, and he made them his very own. He took on our sinful flesh. He bore our burden to Calvary, and there he suffered and died alone. Because he was made sinful flesh like mine, he can identify with sinful flesh like mine, and he cannot just judge.

He can redeem and he can save. And see, that means two things about us. Number one, it means that even if your personal history, the story of your life reads like this genealogy. If it's filled with embarrassing mistakes, it means that God can still redeem it all into his perfect 14. You might think your life is over this weekend. You might have come into this church.

The marriage just dissolved, the divorce is final. The kids will no longer speak to you. Maybe you lost your job again.

Maybe you got kicked out of school. You think your life is over. This genealogy shows you that Jesus may just have begun his greatest work in you. He is a savior who specializes in the broke, the broken, and the weak.

That means that he can help you this weekend. Second thing, it shows us some at church is that our message at this church is primarily for the outsider. We have always said that we do not wanna be a church that simply puts on a better show than the other churches in the area so that we can attract bored Christians from other churches who can come and be a part of our club. We know that the ministry that God has given us is primarily to be focused on those that are outside of the community that you and I would be a part of, which is why we do things like Serve RDU, because we are not trying to do, we don't do that because it helps the attendance at our church. We do that because we know that people who have been impacted by the gospel become like the gospel.

And we know that Jesus came for the outsider, and that means our focus also is going to be on the outsider. The fourth thing this genealogy shows us, Matthew shows us that Jesus is our long-awaited rest. Now, it shows you at the beginning that this genealogy is three sets of 14, right? I know it's been a while since you've been in math class, but three 14s is the same as six sets of seven.

Fair? Right, three 14s is the same, I'll give you a minute to, three 14s, six sevens, which would make Jesus the seventh seven. Seven is the most significant biblical number, it is the number of completion, it signifies rest. God rested on the seventh day, that's the Sabbath. Every seven years in Israel, according to the book of Leviticus, the farmland was supposed to rest.

They let the soil lie fallow so that the nutrients could replenish. And then on the year of the seventh seven, the 50th year, that was called the year of Jubilee. That was a special time in which all debts were forgiven in Israel and all indentured servants were freed.

When Matthew shows you that Jesus comes as the seventh seven he is trying to say that Jesus is the ultimate year of Jubilee. He is the ultimate Sabbath, the ultimate rest. In him, all debts will be forgiven, all slaves will be freed. He came not just to redeem what is broken and dysfunctional, he came to set the prisoners free. And I know that every week into this church we got people that are under bondage of all kinds. We got some that are under the bondage of addiction, some that are under the bondage to relationships that they know they shouldn't be in their lives but they can't shake them. Some that are under the bondage of just a destroyed self image, some that are under the bondage of being controlled by money or controlled by the praise of people. Some are overwhelmed by the burden of trying to please God or trying to please others.

Some feel crushed by the burden of trying to sustain themselves, to take care of their family, to provide for themselves, to make life work. Jesus proclaims in Matthew, come unto me all you who labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest. It's what I wish I could get some of you to see about the gospel because you think of it exactly the opposite. You think that coming to Jesus takes you from a place of rest moral rest to where you got to feel guilty all the time and you got burdens on you and my job every week is to tell you how bad you are at doing them and make you feel guilty and put more burden on you. That's not the gospel. The gospel is that it begins in rest. It begins in rest by me proclaiming to you that the price for your sin has been paid not one ounce by you but all by Jesus. That God gives you his favor not in response to how well you do, how much you pray, how much you read the Bible. He gives his favor to you as a gift in Jesus Christ. Yes, you work as a Christian. Yes, you'll find Christians are often very busy people but we do it not in order to earn the favor of God. We do it in joyful response to having been given the favor of God and that's a totally different kind of work. One leads you to weariness because it's never enough.

The other leads you to overflow in joy where you just say I love doing what I do because it's the overflow of my heart. There are many of you this weekend that are overwhelmed by this burden of trying to please people. All your life, you've tried to earn a claim of others.

When you have Jesus' favor, when you have Jesus' favor, you find yourself relieved of the burden of always trying to prove yourself to everybody. Early on in my ministry, I realized I was tired. I wasn't tired because I was working too hard. I wasn't tired because the demands of this church were too much. I was tired because I was always living for the approval of different groups of people and it never seemed to be enough.

You'll never realize how tired you are from trying to earn the love and the attention of others until you've been freed from it for even just a little bit. But we actually got to see a great example of that this week. Many of you probably saw this. It was on Tuesday night, I think, two Olympic divers from the United States who won the silver medal. How many of you saw this?

David Badaya, I think, and Steel Johnson, if I got their names right. So they get the silver medal and the NBC reporter goes up after they win and she asked a couple of questions and then she asked, I think it was David, she said, so, she said, you know, were you really nervous for this last dive knowing that this was it? Like, you know, like this would determine whether or not you would get a medal?

And she puts the mic in his face and he said, no. He said, because we know that our identity is in Christ, not how well we do on this platform. And that means that whether we get a medal or not, our identity is fixed and we don't depend on this or placing in a, we don't depend on that for our identity, it's in Christ.

Watch this other interview where he was explaining. He said, you know, if we belly flop, we get a perfect 10, we come down with the same identity we were up on the platform with and that identity is in Christ. The interviewer was like, turns to the other guy, puts it in his face and this guy was like, he's like, well, I'm gonna say my friend David said it exactly right, our identity is in Christ, not in how well we perform. Do you understand the confidence that can give you in life?

When you are relieved of the burden of trying to prove yourself by how pretty you are, when you no longer feel like I gotta be the prettiest girl in school, I gotta weigh this or I gotta look like that or I gotta make this much money or I gotta dress like this in order to earn people's approval, it just suddenly becomes freeing because I now have the opinion, the highest opinion of the only one whose opinion really matters and that frees me from tyranny to your opinions. Some of you are under that bondage and what Jesus says is I can give you rest from that and then what's even more, when you know that you're his favorite child, when you really realize you're his favorite child, the worries of the world lift off of your shoulders because you start to say things like, Paul, what then shall I say to these things? If God is for me, who could be against me? He who did not spare his own son but freely gave him up for us all, will he not also with him graciously give us all things? It won't be one, Jesus said, who won't be one who knows how many hairs are on your head and knows when one sparrow falls out of the sky, won't he also care for you?

Why should I be discouraged? Why should the shadows come? Why should my heart be lonely and long for heaven and home? Because Jesus is my portion, my constant friend is he.

His eyes on the sparrow, I know he watches me. You'll find that there is a rest that goes with being a child of God that is freeing like nothing else kind. So Jesus says, come unto me, all you who labor in a heavy laden and I will give you rest. And that is what some of you most need this weekend is you need rest from trying to find acceptance, rest from trying to prove yourself all the time, rest from bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders. That rest is in Jesus.

Lastly, and this is probably the big point for today that pulls them all together, number five. Matthew shows us that God's ways are unexpected. God's ways are unexpected, but they are wonderful. You know, nobody saw this coming, right? They thought he was gonna come as a mighty conqueror. They thought he would come as a judge to end all oppression. But if that's how Jesus had come, if he had come like they expected, he could not have helped us.

He would have crushed us. So he came in a totally unexpected way, but that wasn't for our frustration. He came in a totally unexpected way for our salvation.

Here's what I wanna ask you. Listen, if that's what God did back then, if he saved them in an unexpected way, if he came unexpected because he was trying to save them, not frustrate them, is it not also possible that when God does something unexpected in your life today that it doesn't mean that he's forgotten you, it doesn't mean he's neglected you, it means that he's working on a better, grander plan that you just don't see yet. Doesn't the coming of Jesus teach you at least that? There's a verse that Christians love to quote. Isaiah 55, eight and nine, you probably have heard it quoted. My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are not your thoughts.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, that's how much higher my thoughts are than your thoughts. And we apply that to a situation where we don't understand. Most people don't know that that verse was written primarily about God's plan of salvation.

Go back and read the context. God was saying, I'm gonna come in a different way and save you differently than you expect because my thoughts and your thoughts are not the same. I understand more than you do.

What I'm after you is trying to show you is if God's plan of salvation happened in an unexpected way, doesn't it make sense that God will continue to do things in your life that might confuse you, but it doesn't mean that he's forgotten you, it just means that he's weaving all of this according to his perfect 14, a better plan than you would have originally thought of for yourself anyway? There are, how many of you, just out of curiosity, how many of you are what we would call planners? I mean like OCD, I make a plan to have a plan kind of planner, go ahead. Go ahead, put your hand up, just put it up there. All right, how many of you are what we call spontaneous?

Right, put your hand up. You like to think of yourselves as adventurous, but you're the ones that us planners are gonna be taking care of when you're old, okay, just so we know. I am a total planner. Actually, truth is I hate to plan, but I hate, even more than I hate planning, I hate not having a plan. And what I most hate is when things don't go according to my plan, right? By the way, if you're single and that's you, don't have children.

Definitely don't take them overseas for seven weeks. We'll just leave it at that. In a sense, I think all of us, whether you consider yourself a planner or not, I think all of us are like that. Nobody likes to have their plans changed, they don't like to have their expectations unmet. Right, doesn't the phrase, there's been a change of plans, doesn't that just make you cringe? Nothing good ever comes after that, right? Like, we were gonna go out to dinner tonight, but there's been a change of plans. That's always bad. I want you to realize, listen, that the greatest things that God did in the Bible always happened when God deviated from the plans.

You ever think about that? They always happened when God deviated from the plans. Think about Mary, we're talking about the birth of Jesus. Mary was not planning on getting pregnant, was she?

When Gabriel shows up and said, hey, I know you're not married, but you're gonna be pregnant. That was a change of plans. Mary was planning on a wedding, but God was planning to change the world. God's plan was better. There are things that happen in your life that are unexpected and unplanned, and God is not doing it the way that he obviously should do it.

Matthew says it's always for your salvation. You see, there is a genealogy that leads to Christ that is filled with randomness and chaos and dysfunction and confusion, but it was a perfect 14 that led to Jesus. There's also a genealogy that leads from Jesus, and it also is filled with randomness and chaos and dysfunction and confusion. But at the end, you'll see God flip it over, and it's all done according to these perfect 14s, and it's all gonna be done with Jesus at the center.

You see, if you're not a Christian, listen to this. If you've never met Jesus, everything in your life up to this point has been designed to bring you to Jesus. It's been God trying to reveal Jesus in you to bring forth Jesus from you. If you are a Christian, then everything AD, after Jesus, in your life is designed to reveal Jesus through you. Because God is writing a plan for history, it is according to a perfect 14, and Jesus is at the center. So let me say it one more time. If you're not a Christian, everything in your life up to this point, everything, every good, every bad part of it, has been designed to bring forth Jesus in you. Have you ever received him? If you are a Christian, everything in your life from that point has been designed to reveal Jesus through you because he's the center. Let me ask you to bow your heads, if you would, all of our campuses, bow your heads.

Let me ask, let me state that last thing in the form of a question. If you're not a Christian, do you realize, maybe, this weekend, God brought you here and he has been pursuing you. He's been speaking to you in your blessings, making you thankful.

He's been trying to wake you up through your pain, telling you you need him. Have you ever surrendered to him? Y'all, the good news, salvation is easy. It's simple, simple because Jesus did all the work.

He paid it all. He came as the Savior, the Redeemer. All you have to do is receive him. You could receive him by saying something to him like this, Lord Jesus, I believe that you're the Savior.

I believe you came for me. Say it to him in your heart, I receive you as my Savior. I surrender to you as Lord. If you've already done that, you know that you're a follower of Jesus, maybe right now you just say to him, Lord Jesus, help me to trust you. That in the good and the bad, you're revealing Jesus through me to others, to my children, to my neighbors, to my parents. God, we pray, we pray according to Matthew one, we pray that your perfect 14 would come through in our lives and that we would trust you every step of the way, reveal Jesus through us to others and reveal Jesus in us, we pray in Christ's name.