Christmas Vocations Part IIIಮಾದರಿ

Matthew has many vocations in the gospels. But in the first chapter of his gospel, we see him playing the role of a genealogist who takes his readers all the way back to Abraham to trace Jesus’s family tree so that we can be confident he is the Messiah.

There are two profound insights we can glean just from verse 1 and verse 17.

First, God is always faithful, but he is rarely fast—at least by human standards. The Jewish people had been waiting thousands of years for God’s promised Messiah. Some had surely given up hope. But Matthew goes through painstaking genealogical detail to show God’s faithfulness over time.

Commenting on Matthew 1, pastor Tim Keller once said this: “[God] may seem to be working very slowly or even to be forgetting his promises, but when his promises come true (and they will come true), they always burst the banks of what you imagined.”

What promise does God appear to be slow to keeping in your work? Maybe you’re still waiting for God’s promise of “wisdom” (James 1:5), “peace…which transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), or “good” to come from your layoff (Romans 8:28-29). Whatever it is, Christmas reminds you that God will always keep his promises, even if it takes far longer than you’d like.

Here’s the second insight I want you to glean from Matthew 1: Jesus is the “seventh seven” that brings about ultimate rest in your work. Matthew highlights six groups of seven generations from Abraham to Jesus, marking Christ as the beginning of the “seventh seven.” This echoes Leviticus 25, where the seventh seven—a jubilee year—freed slaves, forgave debts, and provided rest for all.

As Keller explains, “The seventh seven, the Sabbath of Sabbaths, was a foretaste of the final rest that all will have when God renews the earth. Matthew is telling us that [true] rest will come to us only through Jesus Christ...In Jesus, you stop having to prove yourself because you know it doesn’t really matter in the end whether you are a failure or a king. All you need is God’s grace, and you can have it in spite of your failures.”

Maybe you would call 2024 a huge “success.” Or maybe it was a massive “failure” by the world’s standards. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter. In victory or defeat, you can say, “It is well with my soul” because the seventh seven has come to set you free from sin and death and to adopt you into the family of God. Rest in his love today!