God With Us
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Countdown
Countdown
Something fun (eg. Game, video, etc.). It is not necessary for this to have a tie in to the lesson, but it can.
Introductions
Introductions
This is culture/ introduction to the series.
Basic Opening Statement: You have community here. You have purpose here. You have a mission. All of that is based on one foundational truth that we want you to hear and share: God wants a relationship with you.
I am _______________ and before we start, let me pray.”
*Pray for God to use what you have to say to move someone further along in their journey towards Jesus.*
We are starting a new series today called Kingdom of Heaven where we will be exploring the very first book of the New Testament, Matthew. Matthew is one of four biographies of Jesus that we have in the Bible, we call them the gospels, which is just a fancy word for good news. But Matthew tells us a little bit about the things that Jesus did while he was walking around here on earth, it tells us what he taught, how he healed people and ultimately it tells us about his death and resurrection. These gospels give us an insider’s perspective on the things that Jesus said and did. But each of them has kind of a different angle, somethings that they want to focus in on about Jesus’ ministry. What we are going to focus on in the book of Matthew is something that he is keen to bring out: this idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. We are going to start at the beginning and work through the book a couple chapters at a time.
Teaching
Teaching
This is the main point/ story of your lesson. Everything you want your students to Know should be covered here.
When you tell a story, beginnings are important, right? So as Matthew gets started telling the most important story ever told, he should start it with a bang, right? I am thinking angels, explosions and car chases. Or, maybe a cool line like, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. He wants to tell a truthful and compelling story about this guy, his friend, Jesus who dies and comes back to life, right? So what is the most compelling thing that you can think of, to get people’s undivided attention, sitting on the edge of their seats? A list of names. You said a list of names, right?
Put Matt 1:1-17 on one slide
Well, maybe not. But for Matthew’s original audience, this would have been like the fight scene at the beginning of every Marvel movie. They have popcorn in their hands and are like, what is going to happen here? So this list of names i sJesus’ family tree. But why would that be interesting to Matthew’s audience?
Matthew is actually doing a lot of things with this list that we might miss. We don’t have time to explore everything that is happening here, so just to give you a taste, we are going to focus in on two names in this list in particular. At the end he kind of highlights these two names again.
Matthew 1:17 (ESV)
17 So all the generations from Abraham to David were fourteen generations, and from David to the deportation to Babylon fourteen generations, and from the deportation to Babylon to the Christ fourteen generations.
Abraham and David, two big names from the Old Testament. So let me just recap the whole Old Testament in a minute. It starts off with two people in a right relationship with God. They make a deal with some sort of serpent thing and a choice to disobey God, to choose to try their own hand at authority which results in a rupturing of their relationship with God, with the rest of creation, and with each other. But in that collapse there is a promise to make it right. One day, there will be one that comes along to “crush the head of the serpent” and to make those right relationships possible again.
So we see a couple of candidates we hope will be the snake crusher, but they all fail to live up to that expectation. Then, a couple of chapters later the story focuses in on Abraham. God makes him a promise, I will give you a land and your descendants will become a nation…that nation will be a blessing to all the other nations. Essentially, the snake crusher will come from the line of Abraham. And again we see all sorts of glimmers of hope: maybe this one is the snake crusher.
SO then, a bunch of other stuff happens, we see the Israelites become slaves and a guy named Pharoah killing a bunch of babies. One baby survives and becomes Moses who leads the Israelites out of Egypt to the Promised Land and we fast forward to a time when the descendants of Abraham have become a nation. They pick the tallest guy they can find to become king. They quickly realize height is not the best thing to judge a king’s worthiness by and then God picks David as the next king and he tells him his throne will last forever. Essentially, the snake crusher will come from the line of David… who is from the line of Abraham.
But then eventually the nation falls apart, the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans, one after the other, come on the scene and it seems as if God’s promises to Abraham and David must have been lost in the mix somewhere. Like the snake is going to win.
Then we get to Matthew.
Do you see what he is saying here?
That promise, to establish a king who would reign forever from the line of Abraham and David, it is not lost. It is not broken. Jesus is the promised Messiah or King who will make things right. He is the snake crusher. But it is even more than that. Matthew’s point in telling the story of Jesus is to point out, to make it clear, that Jesus is the fulfillment of all the promises, all the predictions, all the symbols and all the history recorded in the Old Testament. It is all pointing to Jesus.
Tension
Tension
What is the rub? Create some questions and feeling.
But one of the things that Matthew does here, which seems strange in this context, when he is announcing the arrival, the birth of a king, is he points out the bad stuff. Like if we just look at
Matthew 1:6 (ESV)
6 and Jesse the father of David the king.
And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah,
If you just look at the text here, this is a messed up story, but when we look at the rest of the story, it is even more messed up. David, this great king from the snake crusher line… His throne that will last forever… did not just father Solomon through adultery, from an other man’s wife, he had Uriah killed so it would not be a problem for him.
That is a messed up story.
But what Matthew is doing here is he is pointing to the insidious evil that infects, even the line of the snake crusher. There is a little bit of the snake underneath the surface of all of us, including David. David is this great king who continued the line of the snake crusher, while, at the same time, continuing the line of snake that runs from the first humans to us today, too.
So while he is pointing to the solution, Matthew is also pointing to the problem. We can not defeat the snake on our own. It is buried too deep within us.
The story of the Bible is that we are all, underneath, touched by this same brokenness. There is almost this drumbeat whenever the Bible introduces a new leader or a new king. It is like this question. When is the snake crusher coming? Is it this guys? Is he going to be the one who rescues us from sin and brokenness. And each time we realize fairly quickly, well, no. This one is a foreshadowing, a type, an idea, a pre-picture of the one to come in some ways. But he is messed up just like me. Underneath there is something broken.
So if we are all messed up, if all our heroes are flawed, how could God bring the snake crusher through this line of men?Well, he has to do something special, unique, different. And Matthew shows us this here:
Matthew 1:21–23 (ESV)
21 She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” 22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet:
23 “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
and they shall call his name Immanuel”
(which means, God with us).
Look at verse 21. Look what Matthew is doing here. He says His name is Jesus. The name Jesus literally means Yahweh/ God saves. So Matthew says His name will be God saves, for HE will save his people. Who will save? God or Jesus? Yes.
And if we did not catch that. His name is Immanuel which means God with us. So Jesus is somehow this human king/ snake crusher that comes from the line of David and Abraham whose throne will last forever. He is this redeemer who will make our relationship with God possible again. He is this conqueror who will issue in the the Kingdom of Heaven. But He is also at the same time God with us.
So Matthew starting his story with this list of names is a much more interesting opening than it looks at first glance.
Response
Response
This is the response portion. Everything you want your students to Do should be touched on here, but you should have at least one immediate action that can be taken.
So Matthew continues his story by telling us about these wise men, or I like to call them space wizards, coming in from the East and talking with this guy named Herod, this puppet king under the roman government, about the king that has been born. Matthew is showing us that the birth of Jesus is so obviously the fulfillment of all that has happened so far. It is like the natural conclusion. It is so obvious even the non-Jewish people are picking up on the signs.
And then all of a sudden Herod looks a lot like Pharoah, by having a bunch of babies killed, and Mary and Joseph and Jesus escape his wrath by going to Egypt (the place where the Israelites had to leave) which makes Jesus look like a new Moses who will deliver his people and you just start to get the picture.
It is not that Jesus is getting rid of the Old Testament. Matthew is saying that the Old Testament is just like this huge question and Jesus is the answer. How can God bring one who can crush the serpent and reestablish this God human Garden Relationship thing, this heaven and earth overlapping thing? How can God bless the nations through Abraham? How can God establish an everlasting throne through a messed up king like David? Jesus.
The unanswerable becomes answerable through Jesus, this God-man who looks like he is going to be the rescuing king.
Cool. So what?
When you look at the story of the Old Testament, you see these little glimpses of hope in the midst of a lot of despair. Especially near the end as the nation of Israel is broken in two pieces, one is taken away and then the other. There is suddenly no king on the throne and then wave after wave of foreign powers sweep in and take control of the land that is supposed to be God’s kingdom until the Jewish people are not even sure of their identity anymore.
And maybe that describes your life. Maybe you feel like you have been torn apart and you are not sure who you are or who you are supposed to be. Maybe life feels like an onslaught of pressures on every side and you are not sure which you are supposed to follow and which you are supposed to reject. Maybe life for you is more despair than hope.
Maybe you are asking those questions. How could God defeat the evil I see around me? How could God establish a relationship with me? Why would He even want to? How could God love me with this snake living just underneath the surface?
The answer is Jesus. God saves. Immanuel. God with us.
He is the snake crusher.
And if that is true, the way we respond to the true king is to give him the sovereign rule over our lives. Telling him he is in charge. We mark ourselves as a part of his kingdom initially through baptism. We say we want to die to our old allegiances and place our allegiance with the True King. SO maybe you need to do that today.
If that is true and you have already marked yourself as a citizen of his Kingdom, maybe you just need to remind yourself of the identity you have as a citizen or even better a child of the king.
If you are not sold. If space wizards and a God man walking among us crushing snakes is too much for you, I get it. But the implications of this are huge and I don’t want you to miss it. So please, if that is you, stick with us.
But right now we are going to do something we do every week to celebrate the fact that Jesus was not just an ordinary dude. We celebrate what he did to answer all of these questions the Old Testament and even our lives cause us to ask. Where God’s Justice and His Mercy come together in one singel moment as Jesus died on a cross to solve the problem of sin and then rose from the dead to solve the problem of death so that his throne could last forever. So while I play this song, feel free to get up and move. If you would like to take communion, just make your way up here and take a chalise. Eat the bread to remember his broken body and the juice to remember his shed blood. If you need prayer or need to make a decision, or you have questions… if you need to talk to an adult, this is a good chance to do that. Or if you want to just sit, listen to the lyrics of the song, pray, or read the Bible, you can do that as well.
Song
Song
Is He Worthy- Andrew Peterson
Discussion
Discussion
Start with Prayer
Have you ever researched your family tree? Were you surprised by anything in it?
Read Matthew 1:21-23
She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the prophet: “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call his name Immanuel” (which means, God with us).
What does it mean to be saved from sins?
What does it mean that God is with us?
How can those things give us hope?
We talked about God using broken people in Jesus’ line to bring about Jesus. If he uses broken people why should we try to be good people?
What can you do this week to remind yourself that Jesus is the king and submit to his rule?