The Geneology of Christ: A Record of God's Faithfulness

If you would again open up your copy of God's Word, we're in Matthew chapter one, verses one through 17, and I'll skip around. So I wanna give the background of this series before I read the text again. This has been a blessed privilege of mine to teach our young kids. My wife and I began teaching the preschool class, and that was something that we have not done in about 10 to 15 years, was to teach the little ones. We wanted a curriculum, and brother Chris and I did some research and found that there was a curriculum about the promises of God.

And it is entitled Truth 78, it's affiliated with John Piper, it's solid theological stuff in an age appropriate way. And every week when I teach kids from JP's age, about two years of age, all the way through seven, eight, nine, and 10, this has been a joy for me. And there have been many times when I thought, I would love for our adults to hear of the faithfulness of God to fulfill His promises throughout the generations. The men of our church got together and we thought it would be good for brother Chris to have a time of rest that was our decision, it was not his. He has not been fired, he is not preaching in view of a call.

He is getting rest, spiritual rest, worshiping with friends right now. So I know he wants to ask for your prayer in this as he is doing some spiritual work, but also to thank you for granting him this time. It's vital for a man of God to be recharged spiritually, to be with other brothers and other pastor friends that he doesn't get to see a lot. So thank you for allowing him to go and for sending him. And then I thought, if I'm preaching during Christmas, what would be the appropriate time for me to share? And I didn't wanna force this, I knew it had to be a Christmas series. Then I started to think about how faithful God has been.

We call Him the Messiah, the promised one. Where else can we see God's faithfulness, but in the giving of the Christ child? And I wanna read this as well, and I wanna preface this with, we serve the covenant keeping God, we serve the God of covenant. And truthfully, I have been reading the Christmas story every year of my life, just about. We had a routine on Christmas Eve, my dad would gather us together, we would all have something of a talent show, where we would play a musical instrument or something we were excited about. For me, it might've been the kazoo, or it might've been toy symbols that I got.

And then my dad would read a Christmas story, and then the siblings would open up one gift. And I got in the habit of reading the Christmas story every single year. As I got to Matthew chapter one and verse 17, to read again this year, I realized that it's my habit of skipping over the first 17 verses of Matthew. If I asked a show of hands, if it's your family tradition to read the Christmas story, we oftentimes skip the lineage. And I understand, if we're not students of the Old Testament, a lot of these names run together. And so I will not exhaustively exegete the first 17 verses of Matthew. I'm gonna pick a few.

But I wanna challenge you, as you go into the Christmas season, get a copy of your study Bible out, and those notes will sometimes, in just a few minutes, give you a reservoir of truth about characters that you might've forgotten or maybe have never heard. And it's also humbling, because to think of some of the people that God used to prepare the way for his son, it is quite encouraging for us to know if God can use some of these folks. I know he can use me. So let's go to the Lord again, and let's read this verse. And I want you to pay a special attention to the covenant-keeping character of our God.

The book of genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Let's skip to verse five. And Solomon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz 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. In verse 16, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born who was called Christ. In verse 17, 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. Let's go to the Lord in a word of prayer. Father, we love you. We thank you for your promise to dwell in our midst. Father, we come here today and ask that you would open our eyes to see that you are dwelling in our midst. Open up our eyes to see your faithfulness. Open up our eyes to see your covenants that have been confirmed, that have been reinforced and reminded. Even your Holy Spirit who seeks only to draw our attention to Christ. How faithful you have been. It's in Jesus name we pray, amen.

So I want to give you the series title, The Faithful God of Christmas, Our Faithful Messiah. I will take certain Christmas stories, perhaps some that we have not paid as much attention to through our years. And we'll highlight the faithfulness of God and I will be trying to do two things at one time. I also want to, if you have a preschooler in my class, I want to give you a chance to see what we've been learning. But the title of the message this morning is The Genealogy of Christ. And this is a record of God's faithfulness. A record of God's faithfulness. We know that God is good and we say these adages, that God is good all the time.

In many cases, in the midst of his faithfulness, we may not truly appreciate how good he is to us. So I want us to take a look first when we see God's faithfulness. I want us to see the context in which Matthew was written. Matthew was written to a Jewish audience and why it may be tempting for us to go straight to the manger, to the Virgin Mary on the treacherous path to crowded Bethlehem. The angels, the wise men, the shepherds. This holds something of a cultural sentimentality for us. Brother Jared spoke of this when he talked about our Christmas carols.

Even the nativity scenes have in themselves a cultural sentimentality that if we're not careful, we will get caught up in that and we will miss the wonder and we will miss true worship. We do the church in injustice and we do the faithfulness of God a disservice. If we don't recognize his character as a covenant keeper throughout generations in the gospel of Matthew, we see his promise keeping on full display. One verse into the book of Matthew when we read this. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

This was written to a Jewish audience and so to establish the case that Christ is the Messiah, he had to be a descendant of David in the flesh. Last Christmas, Brother Chris faithfully and masterfully talked about the incarnation. The incarnation is the doctrine of how God became man. While Christ was fully God, he was fully man. When we look at his physical lineage, we're looking at essentially Joseph's background. We know Joseph was not his true biological father 'cause scripture tells us that he was born of the Holy Spirit. But in order for the promised one to come to his promised people, he had to fit the bill.

He had to meet the criteria. So this was essential for the gospel writer. The Hebrew does not have a particular word for promise. So if you were to read the Old Testament in the original language of Hebrew, you wouldn't have the word promise per se. In fact, you have ordinary words such as to speak, to say, or to swear. But when God of heaven visits humanity through prophets, through visions, through angels, and he says, the scripture tells us, and God spoke to Abraham, or God said, or God swore, an ordinary word becomes extraordinary. God says in the Old Testament, through the course of his working, I will accomplish this.

His promises are also at times given in the negative, I will never, such as Jeremiah 29, 11, I will never leave you or forsake you. Spoken through the weeping prophet Jeremiah, who had no converts, this was a promise that on the verge of deportation and punishment for their sin, God is telling his people through Jeremiah, it may feel like I have departed, but I will never leave you or forsake you. So God's promises begin with a declaration. God is simply saying what he will do. When the promises are given, they are not always received in faith, as we'll see with Zechariah.

When God gives a promise, sometimes they are too marvelous for us to imagine. And God gave a divine declaration to his people throughout the generation. Basically five things he said. He said he would be their God. He said they would be his people. He said that he would dwell in their midst. He gave them a promised land, and he told them of the promised Messiah. And the culmination of the promise is what we celebrate in Christmas.

And if all we see is a manger and acute nativity scene, and heaven forbid, if all we see is our Christmas list and the receipt that our Amazon Prime gift is on its way, if all we have are those trappings, then we miss the faithfulness. And if we do our best to be spiritual and to read the Christmas story, we could very well just skip over generations, generations, generations of God's goodness and faithfulness to us. At Grace Life, we take effort and take care to be diligent in these things. I wanna introduce God's promise to Adam. We'll read Matthew 1-1 again, and we will spend some time speaking about Genesis 3.

I don't know that I will read too much of Genesis 3, but certainly would encourage you to visit that great passage. But let's go to God's word. The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham. We see that God first promised a Messiah in the garden. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve just became sinners. They were created in the image of God. They were perfect. But on that day at Satan's temptation, Eve took the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. She disobeyed God's law and she gave the fruit to her husband. This reminds us that mankind needs forgiveness. You stand here today in need of forgiveness.

If you have not received the blood of Jesus as you're covering, then you stand in the same shape that Eve remained in. And in their sin, God covered them with animal skins. He speaks of a promised Messiah in Genesis 3.15. He says, "I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring, and he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel." In talking to Satan and pronouncing judgment to Satan, Jesus actually is prophesied. Jesus is referenced in Genesis 3.15. Let's read the words of Martin Lloyd-Jones. "Man immediately came under condemnation and was punished by God.

Whereas formally, he had only been blessed. Spiritually, he immediately fell from his original righteousness. That he sinned, he lost that uprightness, that correspondence with the moral character of God. And equally, he was separated from God at once and his fear came in. Before Adam and Eve took of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, they were not sinners. They had unbroken fellowship. God would walk with them in the cool of the day." I spoke of you of the five elements of every promise of scripture, that he would be their God and they would be his people and that he would walk among them.

Just as he walked with Adam and Eve in the coolness of the day. And in our fallen state, we do not have fellowship with the Lord. Christ came to restore this and he restored this perfectly. Mankind not only needs forgiveness, but mankind needs covering. You see, when the Lord came looking for Adam and Eve, he had to slay an animal. He had to kill an animal. He had to take the animal skins and he had to cover Adam and Eve. In Christ, the promised Messiah is our covering. Lloyd-Jones continues in speaking of our fallen nature and the ramifications for your everyday life.

The ramifications for their sin and the ramifications for your own sin follow you every single day in your attitudes, your attitude at work, even when you're seemingly obedient to your boss, the grumbling and the murmuring and the complaining are all touched by the fall. Let's listen to what Lloyd-Jones says. The Bible asserts that the entire world is guilty of sin, but the Bible goes further and says that sin has not only affected all men and women, but has also affected their entire nature. That every part of their being is involved, body, soul and spirit. Brother Chris has preached faithfully over the years that we are double-damned.

We are damned because of Adam's sin and we are damned because of our own sin. And if we can approach Christmas without a reminding of our fallen nature and our propensities of sin and how sinfulness, not just Adam's, but mine, it has affected my thoughts, my emotions, my feelings, our physical death, the fact that we die. It's mirrored by every bad attitude, by every sense of grumbling. And even when the Lord sends trial our way, our fallenness is not far from us. We can intellectually know that God has sent something that we may not like. He is in charge of it. We read Job and we find out that Satan has to ask permission.

So God allows things. Satan intends them for evil. God intends them for good. And even understanding that his sovereign care is behind us. We miss the great truth of the promise. He is our God. We are his people. He is dwelling among us. And he will never leave us or forsake us, even when we are being punished. The Christmas promise maintains that Jesus is the Christ. We needed a savior. We needed a covering. He provides both. Second Corinthians 1, 19 through 20. Like to ask you to write this down and go back and read this sometime. I will reference it several times today and several times throughout the series. This is Paul.

Speaking to the church in Corinth. For the Son of God, Jesus Christ, whom we proclaimed among you was not yes and no, but in him it is always yes. For all the promises of God find their yes in him. I grew up hearing this verse said this way. And the promises of God are in Christ, yes and amen. We sang the line, see the true and better Adam. Did not ask Brother Jared to sing that song. I'm so glad that he did. That manger and the nativity scene that you see on someone's coffee table when you walk into their house is not a cultural icon. It is representation of God's fulfilled promises that he came to clean up our mess.

And he came up to clean up our mess at the expense, the blood of his son. So at Christmas time we see God's first, his promise to Adam. Secondly, we see his promise to Abraham. You can say this is God's promise to Abraham or God's promise to the patriarchs. Let's read Matthew one and verse two. Abraham was the father of Isaac and Isaac the father of Jacob and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers. Each of the people in the lineage of Christ serve as a reminder of God's covenant keeping character. Every generation passed. The promise at that point was unremained, was not fulfilled.

But as Hebrews tell us, Abraham believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. With every generation, Abraham would tell his kids who told their kids. A few summers ago I took our church through the book of Moses, the book of Exodus. Then I took our youth through it. And God prophesied thousands of years, better part of a thousand years before the Hebrews were in exile, before they were in Egypt. And God told Abraham that his people would dwell on a foreign land for 400 years. At one point he asks God, how will I see this? He's coming from the perspective, I'm going to die.

How will I see that I have more children than the stars in the universe? Scripture tells us that he believed it. God gave him the promise of an heir, the promise of land, and the promise of blessing all nations. He ponders this. The patriarchs believed and they pondered. Abraham asked God in verse eight. But he said, this is verse eight of Exodus chapter 15. Oh Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? I would like to read a pretty lengthy, fairly lengthy portion of scripture. You can go back and study this. This is Exodus 15, 12 through 18. God visits Abram, this is his name at the time.

He visits Abram, Abram at this point is in his 80s. He is already past childbearing age and the Lord tells him that he will have an heir. And he asks God, how am I to know that I shall possess it? Verse 12, Exodus 15. As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell on Abram and behold dreadful and great darkness fell upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there. And they will be afflicted for 400 years. But I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.

As for you, you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried in a good old age and they shall and he alone had the power to fulfill this promise. Come back here in the fourth generation for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete. And when the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking fire pot and flaming torch passed between these pieces. On the day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham saying, to your offspring, I will give this land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.

So if I can just set the scene here, God is speaking with Abraham, he's saying, I'm going to not only do the impossible, I'm gonna give you a biological child, but you're gonna have more children than the stars that you're looking at in the heavens. You won't see them. And at one point they will be brought down to another land and after 400 years, I'm gonna bring them back. And he simply asked this question. This is not doubting God, this is what I call a pondering. How am I going to know that I'm blessed? I mean, I receive it now, I believe it, but how is it that I'm going to experience this blessedness?

And so God does something here and I remember studying this passage in my Old Testament college class. And I remember this is my first time I gripped me, how frightening this was. So I need to set the stage here. In old cultures, old world cultures, your word was bond. And in some cultures, specifically the culture he was living in, when two people wanted to set an agreement, whether it's purchase a payment and the payment will come when harvest is in or a pact to intermarry between two clans, peace agreement or something of great magnitude. At village elders would take a cow in some cases other animals and would cut the animal in half.

And I remember reading and getting this visual and thinking how intense this picture is. But God actually puts Abraham asleep and he's having this intense vision of animals cut in half. And there was a flaming smoking pot, which we now know to be the Holy Spirit passes in between these animals. In ancient cultures, two village elders would cut animals and they would put them in two separate locations. And they would say, if I violate the covenant of our agreement, then may I be like this animal. He's saying, if I violate this covenant, then may this be done to me and my family. This is as serious of an agreement as you can make.

In our day, we take it before the judge and it's sealed and it's stamped and it's notarized. But in ancient cultures, the notarization of something was done through this kind of blood pact. And when God promises Abraham that he is going to give him a people more than the face of the planet, more than the stars in the sky, he gives him essentially a blood oath. God passes through severed animals. And essentially the fact that the Holy Spirit seals this promise, he is communicating to Abraham, I am the only one that can fulfill this promise. Now, I wanted to show you some of the pictures that we've been showing the kids.

And I hate that we couldn't make that happen technologically, but I show the kids a display of a Ferris wheel. And I asked the young kids, say, if your parents say, I'm gonna take you to the fair and we're gonna ride a great Ferris wheel and we're gonna do this, not this Saturday, but next Saturday. That's a promise. The kid gets so excited. What are some reasons why a parent may not fulfill that promise? Let's just think about that. As parents, inevitably you've had the time when you told your kid that you would do something and it couldn't work out, it didn't work out, it couldn't happen.

So let's look at four reasons why humans may not fulfill their promises. So the first problem that we might have in fulfilling our promises is the knowledge problem. Humans lack all of the knowledge. For instance, we don't know what's happening two weekends from now. There may be a great storm. The Ferris wheel at the park may break down. Someone in the family may get very, very sick. And your kids can understand this. We wanna encourage you to teach your kids great truths like this. Your kid could understand, our kids in this class got it, especially when I showed the picture of a Ferris wheel.

Now the word that I tried to teach them, I don't know if they got this, but it's omniscient. When God makes a promise to Abraham that he will have more descendants than the stars in the heavens, God alone has the omniscience. He is all-knowing. He is outside of time. In fact, God is with us here now just as he is presently with Abraham thousands of years ago. If we can let our minds explode at that thought, that the Lord is currently at his second coming now. God knows no time. He is infinite. We are confined to time, space, history, and the Lord is not. Therefore, the knowledge problem is not a problem for God.

What's another reason why you may not take your kid to the great Ferris wheel in two weekends? You might have the power problem. You know, sometimes humans lack the power to fulfill their promises. Let's say something terrible happens, and let's say the bank forecloses and you literally have no money. You become destitute, and you don't have the money whereas you thought you did two weeks ago. You no longer have the money to take your kid to the great Ferris wheel. God has no limitation of power. He has no limitation of resources. He can accomplish anything. There's also the sin problem.

Do you know we've ministered to all kinds of kids in our 10 years in this fellowship. And we have known parents who would make these grand promises to their kids, knowing full well that it would not happen. We would see kids that we would go pick up for church or vacation Bible school and we'd bring them in and they would come in and they would say really outlandish promises such as, oh yeah, they've said we're gonna go to Hawaii, the whole family, we're gonna take a cruise. Knowing full well that the odds were really stacked against them because they just had lights cut off or they had problems making ends meet.

And parents will sometimes in their desire to bless children will just speak out of their intentions. We don't have a full understanding of the depravity, I think. Sometimes we lose sight of how people can mistreat their kids, but this is not a problem that God has. When he spoke to Abraham and said, you're going to have a mighty nation and I'm going to bring them back to the land you're standing on right now, he had no sin problem to deal with. Humans also have an integrity problem. People can just lie to their kids.

I trust this wouldn't be the case for anyone here, but people lie and sometimes people just tell false information to their kids. God doesn't have the knowledge problem, the power problem, the sin problem, or the integrity problem. We could fast forward to the days of the law in Exodus 15 when God was faithful to Abraham. He was faithful to that word and in the Exodus, about two million Hebrew people crossed through the Red Sea and impossibility, but God did not have the power problem. And a year after passing through the Red Sea, scholars say about 11 months, Moses stood on the mountain and God gave the law.

The law is a series of conditional promises. If you teach these promises to your kids and your grandkids and if they teach them to their kids, then I will bless you in the land where you are going. We know that several generations repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, the Israelites did not obey the law and that led to their deportation to Babylon. So this is a promise. We see the promise to Adam. We see the promise to Abraham. But we also see the promise to Gentiles and to all humanity. Let's read Matthew chapter one, verses five and six.

"And Solomon, the father of Boaz by Rahab, "and Rahab, 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." God promised to send a Messiah to Adam. He promised to send the Messiah to Abraham and the patriarchs. And he also promised and he blesses all nations, Gentiles such as you and I with his promise. If I'm honest of all of the truth that we will cover today, this is probably the one that's blessed me the most. I want you to see that God saves Gentiles. Psalms 145.9 says, "The Lord is good to all.

"His mercy is over all that he has made." Even those peoples who lived and died and never heard the gospel, Scripture tells us in this verse that the Lord is good to them. The Lord has promises, the fact that they can live, the fact that they can enjoy common grace, the fact that they have the joys of family and fellowship. God is good to all, Psalms 145.9 tells us. And when we look at verse five of Matthew chapter one, we see evidence of this. I wanted to spend some time thinking about Boaz. Now Boaz was not a Gentile, but his mother was. If you read this lineage, you might recognize the name Rahab. Who was Rahab?

She's also been called Rahab the harlot. When the Israelites, after spending 40 years in the desert, crossed the Jordan, the first city that was the gateway to the promised land was Jericho, had imposing walls. And two Israelite spies went into Jericho and they went into the residence of a common prostitute, Rahab. And Rahab provided them safety, she provided them shelter. She told the officials of Jericho that the men came to her dwelling and went into the mountains. She had them hidden in her roof. And after the nation of Jericho, the city of Jericho fell, she and her family became affiliated with the nation of Israel.

And in fact, her descendants, Boaz had a mom who was a Gentile. She was of the city Jericho and a woman of ill repute. Boaz, his name means strength. His name literally means in his name is strength. And isn't this just like God to take something that is common and to create strength? Boaz, a man of wealth and strength, a man of nobility, lived in a time of the judges when every man did what was right in his own eyes. Boaz was a noble man, but he had compassion on the weak. I would also encourage you to go back and read the book of Ruth, it's so heartwarming.

This was a time of anarchy, literally, a time of they were not following the rules God set before them and they had no king and everyone did exactly what they saw fit. But in this glimmer of hope, we find Boaz. Ruth was a Moabite. Moabites were the descendants of Lot. She had abandoned the idols of her homeland. She'd embraced poverty and suffering simply to care for her mother-in-law. And she developed a reputation as she came back with her mother-in-law, Naomi, as a hard worker. She gleaned in the fields, Ruth chapter two tells us. And this was an act of humility. She embraced the suffering of the lowest slave, actually lower than a slave.

Because in this society, you had landowners, you had slaves, and then you had those foreigners, people who came from another nation who were wondering. And God's law actually had a statute which said, if you are reaping at a harvest and you accidentally drop grains of wheat on the ground, don't pick them up, leave them for the poor. Well, Boaz is walking through and he's seeing his servants and he notices someone he did not recognize. You see, Boaz can be a type of Christ because Christ recognizes the poor. Christ recognizes the spiritual poverty that we have. He's the God who sees. And here you have Ruth who is working.

He asks a foreman, who is this person I don't recognize? He says, well, this is Ruth with Naomi. She has been the first one to show up and she's the last one to leave. And she works harder than most of your hired servants. And if you were a wanderer, if you were foreign and you came into one of these fields, these large fields would be divided up and they had several landowners. And in this section, you're working, perhaps that landowners slaves were kind. But if you passed and crossed a boundary line, perhaps other slaves would not be kind. 'Cause in a sense, you're taking from them, they received a portion.

So Boaz, who notices the poor, goes to his foreman and says this, make sure she stays with you and she doesn't go into another landowners property. And make sure that if foreigners didn't always know the rules, if she pulls directly from the stalk, do not scold her as you would a common slave. And he does several things and he says at lunchtime, the break, I want you to make sure that she eats with us and give her a double portion. And he is doing all of these things. Now many scholars, very liberal scholars will actually say that he had impure motives. First of all, he's a landowner.

If he wanted an extra concubine or a wife, he could have had one. If you read the book of Ruth, scripture tells us about five times that he was a noble man. He was a godly man. Why was he seeing after Ruth? Because I think it reminded him of his mother. His mother, the harlot of Jericho, came into Israel and was welcomed. She was a Gentile and a Gentile of ill repute, but she was a key factor in God saving Israel and delivering Israel. And I think he had compassion on this woman. He saw how hard she worked. He saw how she gave up everything. I want you to see that God saves the poor. He notices the poor. He cares for the poor.

And he includes the poor. And just as Ruth was instructed to eat Boaz's food, she had an abundance. We eat at the table at Christmas time and we feast on the promises of God and we have more than we can handle. In concluding, let's read verse 17. 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 Christ, 14 generations. Matthew Henry says we have three groups of 14. And in these three 14s, we have three remarkable periods. In the first 14, we have the family of David rising and looking forth as the morning.

In the second, we have the Davidic line flourishing. In the third, we have it declining, growing less and less, dwindling into a family of a poor carpenter. And then Christ shines forth. We see that in these three groups of 14, you can do the math, 14 times three, every single generation is chock full of promises, more than we can possibly address in one message. So this is how I wanna conclude. I wanna give you five ways, five ways not to miss Christmas. Five ways, five things you can do this year to keep you from missing Christmas. Now, number one, try not to live in the moment. This has become a humanistic panacea, live in the moment.

There's a professional athlete that I like reading about. He says he even doesn't like to say things like I can't wait because he wants to be in the moment. But as a Christian, if we're in the moment, if we're fixated on something that we like about today, we miss the fact that we are finite. That moment that you are in will be fleeting and it will be gone. The Lord is yesterday, today and forever. I wanna challenge you to read some of these Old Testament stories that tie in with the faithfulness of God at Christmastime. Although we are confined to the moment our God is not. Secondly, I want you to be fixated on his faithfulness.

I wanna challenge you to be fixated on his faithfulness. Because if you're not, you'll be focused on the flesh. Even good things such as what is the schedule by which we will be everywhere we have to be. What is the menu? What is the present that I need to get? We have so many good things that we need to be concerned with. But if we're not careful, we will be fixated on things of the flesh that are fleeting. And we won't focus on the faithfulness of God throughout the generations. The third challenge. Praise the covenant keeper. Let's praise this covenant keeping God. Do you remember the five elements of all of his promises to the patriarchs?

Right, he promised to be their God. We are his people and he is our God. He promised to dwell in our midst. Do you realize that's what's happening right now? When we gather as Christians, he is our God. We are his people. We're singing songs of praise. We submit to his word and he is in our midst. We have a promised land. And we await that time when we see our promised Messiah face to face. The fourth way that you will not miss Christmas, give thanks. Not simply giving thanks for your house and your job and all that is the provision of God and it's great. But have you thanked God for conquering Pharaoh at the Red Sea?

That seems really far removed. But do you realize that even reading Exodus and seeing God conquering Pharaoh proved that he was faithful to his promise to Abraham? And if he's faithful then, he's gotta be faithful now. And when he said that I will never leave you or forsake you, he's talking to you and me. Yes, I understand it was to the original audience, the weeping prophet Jeremiah said that. But we can as a church, whatever hardship and difficulty we go through, we can know that promise is for us as well. He will never leave us and forsake us. The fifth, the fifth thing you can do so as not to miss Christmas is simply repent.

Have you really embraced the fact that you're not a promise keeper? You have broken a promise. Chances are you've looked at someone in the face and lied. You also have made promises out of good intention, but you have the knowledge problem. There's certain things, certain factors, certain variables you just didn't see coming. It doesn't matter. God doesn't grate on the curve. We are graded by his standard of holiness and we fall short. And the answer today is not in a manger scene or in a nativity set. The answer today is in Christ. We repent now the same way that Abraham repented in belief and faith.

He believed God's promises and they were credited to him as righteousness and we believe his promises as well. If you're gripped with your sin this Sunday morning, I wanna encourage you to repent and trust upon Christ. His blood is sufficient. We celebrate the covenant keeping character of Christ. We will see this in full display next Sunday. Let's bow. Let's go to the Lord in a word of prayer.