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Christ-mess
God Redeems our Mistakes
Christmas Eve 2017
Her name was Rahab.
His name was David.
At first glance, they couldn’t be more different.
One, a poor prostitute who encountered God’s people quite by accident as they showed up at her door looking for a place to hide.
The other, a King.
A man who had followed God from the time he was a child.
A king.
A prostitute.
What could they possibly have in common?
Well, both of them are in the family line of Jesus.
You heard the two tell the stories begin by reading the genealogy in .
That ancestry list ends like this…
-Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary.
Mary gave birth to Jesus, who is called the Messiah.
Though these two come from very different backgrounds, and they both played a part in God’s story.
Around here we’ve been talking about the messiness of Christmas.
Christmas is a wonderful, joyful time of year, but also pretty stressful and chaotic.
-If you are in debt…
-If you have a strained relationship…
-If you lost a loved one…
-If you’re lonely…
There is nothing like Christmas to bring those things to the forefront.
One of the biggest stressors that people face this time of year is family.
Family makes up some of the messiness right?
In fact, some of you are in this room right now because some of your family came in town for Christmas, and you came here to get away from them for an hour.
Or, maybe that family decided to come with you and is sitting next to you right now.
Wow, this is awkward isn’t it?
Jesus’ genealogy shows us that he was not exempt from this issue.
The spotless Lamb of God had a lot of black sheep in his family.
Even if we simply focus on the familiar parts of the Christmas story, we see family messiness…
-Mary and Joseph - no one believes her.
Joseph is plotting divorce.
No record of either of their parents.
TS - It is in the midst of all this family drama that we receive some of the greatest news of all - God Redeems our Mistakes.
Think about Rahab - up until the moment she met God as her city was literally falling down around her, her life was one big mistake.
But God turned her life around.
She joined up with the Israelites.
Become one of God’s own people.
She married a good, godly man and had a family.
That family put her, this crazy mistake-filled prostitute, in the family line of Jesus himself.
God used her, despite her mistakes, as a stepping stone on the way to Jesus saving the world.
Think about David.
Though he knew God, and had for a long time, he committed adultery and killed a man to cover it up.
Yet God still used him.
In fact, a child of David and Bathsheba’s would become the greatest king over Israel.
Because David repented of his sin and God forgave him, David is remembered as a ‘man after God’s own heart.’
God used both David and Rahab to fulfill his plan.
Used them to bring salvation into the world.
Jesus’ very name means salvation.
He came to save.
And David and Rahab got to be a part of that.
In spite of their mistakes, God forgave them and used them.
We come into this room tonight filled with mistakes.
You’ve screwed up, right?
And no one but you and God know just how much.
The things you’ve done, said, thought.
Only you and God know how dark that darkness really is.
And on top of it, Christmas at times has a way of exaggerating those mistakes.
But know this tonight…the message of Christmas is that God can redeem those mistakes.
Through Jesus he offers salvation.
God has come into the world.
In spite of the mistakes and the messiness, in fact, to fix those very things, Jesus was born.
And that is what we celebrate tonight.
God doesn’t just redeem mistakes, he redeems people.
Concept of redemption (make up for, exchange) - “he redeemed himself with that one.”
The Good News of Christmas, of Jesus, is that you cannot redeem yourself.
You can’t make up for the mistakes.
But God can.
God does.
Here’s how…Many who get bent out of shape this time of year about keeping Christ in Christmas…and I understand the sentiment.
But we dare not leave Jesus here at Christmas.
This Jesus didn’t stay in the manger.
As God in the flesh, he lived sinlessly, and went to the cross to die in our place.
To take the penalty of eternal death for our mistakes onto himself, so that by placing our trust in Jesus, we could be forgiven.
Jesus died your death so you could live his life.
Believe
Repent
Confess
Baptize
COMMUNION
Candle Lighting -
Rahab
: “This is a record of the ancestors of Jesus the Messiah, a descendant of David and of Abraham: Abraham was the father of Isaac.
Isaac was the father of Jacob.
Jacob was the father of Judah and his brothers.
Judah was the father of Perez and Zerah (whose mother was Tamar).
Perez was the father of Hezron.
Hezron was the father of Ram.
Ram was the father of Amminadab.
Amminadab was the father of Nahshon.
Nahshon was the father of Salmon.
Salmon was the father of Boaz (whose mother was Rahab).”
Her name was Rahab.
For as long as she could remember she worked as a prostitute.
It had been so long, in fact, that she wasn’t even sure how she had fallen into the profession.
All she knew was that it paid the bills.
Born in the ancient city of Jericho, Rahab was a woman in a culture that afforded women very few rights.
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