Well I’m back after a short break, I feel refreshed and ready to do God’s will and ready to talk more about his amazing gift through Jesus Christ. So many things have challenged me over the past week, its difficult to know what part of the scripture to start from. I had said that I would start a study in Job, and I still intend to do so, but I think from a young(ish) Christian that I am, its good to go through the life that made my forgiveness and freedom possible. I am therefore going to go through the book of Matthew and look at Jesus’ life.
To do this I need to make one or two things perfectly clear. The build up to Jesus’ life is one of many millennia of prophecy that can be viewed throughout the Old Testament, I do not have the time or the space to write about that just yet but I will dip into the Old Testament from time to time to drive home certain points.
I am going to post excerpts from the passages that I will look at but I would urge you to read the whole chapter either on your own at some point to see what I am referring to.
The start of Matthew 1, gives a genealogy of Jesus Christ, and its amazing to look at, it gives an account of Jesus’ family tree from Abraham all the way through to Jesus himself. I don’t know about you but I don’t know if I could go back even 3 or 4 generations. It serves the point that Jesus was the “Lion of the clan of Judah” who featured in the story of Joseph (made famous by Andrew Lloyd Webber).
The conception of Jesus was something of a miracle itself. I know that you are all very familiar with the story, but sometimes its good to look at these things with fresh eyes to enable us to actually take what happened not on face value, or for granted, but for what it was, an amazing miracle.
Matthew 1 v 18 This is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about: His mother Mary was pledged to be married to Joseph, but before they came together, she was found to be with child through the Holy Spirit.
God gave Jesus to Mary and she was a virgin. In human terms this is a physical impossibility. But that’s my point; God is the God of impossibility. We should take strength from the conception of Jesus because if God can enable a virgin to conceive and doing the absolute impossible, why should we worry when we are faced with impossible tasks? We have a living God at the head of our lives, and this God can do all things.
Its interesting to see that Mary hadn’t asked for this happen, she didn’t pray for a child and she certainly didn’t pray for God to perform a miracle in her life, yet God blessed her with the most awesome of tasks, to bring God’s son into the world! Again, we should take enormous encouragement from that, because through God’s plan, things can change and things can come our way that we didn’t ask for or expect but they are such a blessing to us! We should trust in God’s unfailing plan.
Things looked to get a little bit difficult because of the culture of that time, Joseph had in mind to divorce Mary and their agreement to marry. I can imagine Joseph seeing this act as the worst thing to happen to him at the time. But as we know, this was a very amazing blessing, and again, we should view our own situations in the same way, things that seem to be bad, and things that look like our lives are crumbling God uses to bring amazing blessing to us.
So already, we can see that God can bless when we don’t expect it, and also when we feel our lives are falling apart.
I pray that you will fully trust God’s plan and trust in his unfailing love and protection for us through all situations. There is no need to fear, there is no need to be stressed about situations as we have the creator of the world working in our lives and helping us.
I hope this will help you with your own walk; tomorrow I am going to look at the peculiar circumstances of Jesus’ birth. In preparation of which, I would suggest you read the whole of Matthew 1.
I am free in Christ alone.
No comments:
Post a Comment