The Past of your Family doesn’t Create your Future:

I was in church today, and the pastor gave a really good sermon.  The sermon was surprisingly all about the first chapter of Matthew which is the genealogy of Jesus.  It is definitely not my favorite section of the Bible.  I know it has importance because it was included in the Bible, but I can definitely find myself nodding off reading or listening to the list of names that creates Jesus’ family.  One point was made that Jesus’ family was filled with cheaters, adulterers, and liars, yet he was still the Savior of the world.  This was a reminder for all of us that it doesn’t matter what your past is or who is in your family, but rather it is the future and your relationship with Christ that makes all the difference.  

One example is Rahab.  She was one of the four women actually mentioned in the genealogy of Jesus.  (Often women were left out of genealogies).  She is also one of my favorite people we are introduced to in the Bible.  She was a prostitute.  However, she was also considered to be a great heroine of the faith because at the time she hid the Israelite spies who were attempting to see the Promised land and were hiding from their enemies.  She did very right by God’s people.  Later, she would become the mother to a man named Boaz who would be later married to another important woman, Ruth. These people would become part of the genealogy of Jesus.  You wouldn’t expect a former prostitute, especially considering the time of history they were in, to be a part of this genealogy of the only holy man to be on earth, but there she is.   

There were many other examples including Abraham, who was a significant leader but also a huge liar and would lie about who his wife was, more than once. There was Judah and Tamar.  Judah, who did not help out his daughter in law, Tamar, after she became widowed twice by two of his sons, and Tamar who would then pretend to be a prostitute who seduced and slept with Judah, so she can finally be taken care of.  There was David, who while a king, and a man after God’s own heart, did have the huge Bathsheba problem where he slept with a woman who wasn’t his wife and then had her husband killed.  

The beautiful thing about being a follower of Christ is it doesn’t depend on your past.  It has nothing to do with what you have done, but rather who you would want to believe in.  If you choose to believe in Jesus as Lord and he has forgiven your sins and has made you fully clean, then you will be accepted as part of God’s family.  The verse that really highlights this is Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”  It is completely a gift from God. Your salvation and the salvations of anyone in your family or anyone you love is completely a gift from God.  

The challenge for you this week is to pray to God for your family.  I don’t know what your relationship is with your family.  I don’t know if you are distant from them, or if you see them all the time.  This may be a time of praise for the family you have received, but it also may be served as a time to pray for your family to find Jesus and to find forgiveness and love.  This may be a time where you genuinely need to ask God if there is any bitterness in your heart towards any particular family members and how he can help you work through this pain and resentment.  This could be a time where you pray over the future generations of your family and that their desire would be to know God and how much he loves them.  There are many different ways to pray over family because everyone’s family looks different and serves different functions in a person’s life.  However, we should know and have seen through this blog that God uses family as a way to share the good news of Jesus.  

I wanted to write this blog post because I really want this to serve as a reminder of God’s love for his people.  We, and I am going to use we, since this includes everyone in the world, have fallen short of the glory of God.  However, we, again, as everyone, have the ability to be made right and made complete with the love of God and the sacrifice he made for all of us on the cross.  Your past and the past of your family members does not make your future, and I pray this will always be something you remember.