Unexpected Christmas | Part 4 | Promise Keeper | Chris Voigt

Promise Keeper
An Unexpected Christmas
December 19, 2021

Remember the days of newsy Christmas letters? In our social media saturated culture, the tradition of sending an annual Christmas letter seems to have disappeared. Much like the usual Facebook or Instagram feed, the typical Christmas re-cap is full of only the good stuff...how fast the kids are growing, where they are excelling in school, sports, or music. Updates on graduations, engagements, weddings, babies, promotions, vacations or retirements...all the best moments, carefully edited to make life look and sound amazing. Because those are the things we want to remember; the things that are fun, happy, and make us feel (and look) good. We tend not to include the hard stuff...the struggles and failures. Even though we know that everybody experiences them, that’s not the kind of news we deem Christmas letter worthy.
 
Throughout the Christmas season, we’ve been taking a look at some of the people in Jesus’ family tree. We’ve discovered that the gospel writer Matthew included a few names in Jesus’ genealogy that we probably would have left out of our only-the-good-stuff Christmas letter! This week, we’ll look at the most famous ancestor of Jesus who, for all his incredibly shining moments, was also a colossal failure. Why would Matthew choose to remind his readers of the struggle and sin of David when there were so many good things he could have highlighted instead?