So, Father, we do thank you. You're such a great God and to adopt us each as your own children. We just uh praise you for that. And Holy Spirit, you are our teacher. It's not me, it's not any other man alive, that you are our teacher, and we praise you and we thank you for that. And so we ask you to teach us this morning that uh you'll give each of us something directly uh that we'll know is directly from you and that we can uh take out with us. And so we uh trust you and thank you for that. And Jesus, uh, we just praise you. We thank you for coming um to earth and so we could uh have a whole new family. And it's in your name we pray. Amen. So last Sunday we looked at the night that uh Jesus was uh was born and how it's a it's really a a different story than we've learned, the story kind of through Western um culture and through Western eyes. How if uh Joseph and Mary had to go to Bethlehem because there was a census taken, and that's where uh where Joseph was from, then anybody that was in Bethlehem had to leave and go to wherever they were from. And so in Bethlehem that night it was really a uh a big family reunion. And Joseph and Mary were surrounded by people that loved them and people that they loved, and they would have had help, and they weren't uh abandoned into a stable that a common home had a manger, which was just a uh a thing where they would put hay so that their animals could sleep, because they all brought their animals in the house at night because they were um their their most prized possession, and it would it would keep them safe, and and uh it was just a beautiful night. And um on Christmas Eve, we're gonna talk a little bit about uh Mary and Jesus and maybe a different perspective on kind of their relationship and how that unfolded. But there's an unsung hero in Jesus' life that we're gonna talk about this morning, and it's his earthly dad Joseph. Joseph lived in a small town in Israel. He was steeped in Jewish tradition because he was a direct descendant of King David, and he was engaged to a young woman that he loved, and her name was Mary. Now, last year when we talked about Jesus' first miracle, which was turning water into wine, and how that came at a uh a wedding ceremony, we talked a little bit about that whole process and what it was like in Jewish uh culture, and how when a young man found a girl that he wanted to marry, he would talk to his father. His dad would then get with the girl's dad and they would arrange a dowry. It was all arranged, but it was not an arranged marriage like we think of an arranged marriage. I mean, they were not the the the girl was not coerced. It was she still uh had uh the opportunity to say yes or no. We see that with Isaac and Rebecca. When he asked Rebecca to marry him, everybody around him said, Ah, are you sure that you sure this is something you want to do? Just like many of us do when we hear about somebody uh somebody getting married. Same sort of thing. And all the arrangements were made just to put the groom in a position to propose uh to his potential bride. And then the girl would say yes or no. And the way that they proposed in Jesus' day was uh was pretty cool. It was kind of the heart of Jesus' first miracle of of turning water into wine. And what it was is that the the m the man would pour a glass of wine and he would sit it in front of uh of the girl. And then he would nervously kind of sit back and see what she would do. Because if she took a sip of the wine, she was saying yes. If she didn't drink, it was a no. But the sip of the wine was the acceptance. He would then give her a ring and then they would be engaged. And it would be a year-long engagement. And what the the man would do is he would go back and prepare a home for them. It would be on, you're either connected to his father's house or nearby. And he would build that one-room house we talked about last week as a place for them to come back to when they would get uh would get married. And and one kind of unique thing is the groom's dad got to pick the time that they were married. And that's it's kind of talked about through uh um the New Testament, is how only God our Father knows the exact uh place and time when Jesus will return for us. But but that's how it worked in Jewish culture. And so everybody was kind of nervous, you know. Joseph's uh building the house, Mary's back getting ready, the family's excited, the town's excited, and uh just waiting to see when the ceremony will actually happen. So Joseph's proposed, Mary's accepted, he's building a home, they're waiting, excited, nervous, and Joseph hears from someone, not from Mary. Hears from someone, a friend, maybe a family member. And what he hears is that Mary is pregnant. It says in Matthew 1, this is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother Mary was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Okay, so you can imagine Joseph's reaction heartbroken, feeling tremendously betrayed, humiliated to a to a degree. And you know, one of his first reactions had to be anger. He doesn't know anything about an immaculate immaculate conception, he hasn't talked to anybody, an angel. All he knows is what he's been told that his fiancee, while he's building her a house, she got pregnant. As a Jewish descendant of David, Joseph is also I mean, for all Jewish descendants, but he'd be specifically aware, coming from this royal lineage of David's family, that there is a law of Moses that addresses this exact situation. And it's in Deuteronomy 22. It says, Suppose a man meets a young woman, a virgin who is engaged to be married, and he has sexual intercourse with her. If this happens within a town, you must take both of them to the gates of that town and stone them to death. The woman is guilty because she did not scream for help. The man must die because he violated another man's wife. In this way you will purge this evil from among you. So Joseph's got a lot going on in his mind, you know, as he's wrestling with this whole thing, and as he's devastated and and heartbroken, and trying to figure all this out. And again, Joseph has not spoken to Mary. He's got two choices. One is he could call her out publicly, have her stoned, uphold the law, and uphold his reputation. It wasn't me. It was some other guy. Or he could ignore the law and try to have compassion on Mary and actually take the shame, some of the shame, on himself. Later, when things calm down, maybe they could get a quiet divorce. And so that's what Joseph faced. And Joseph chooses mercy and compassion over the law and punishment. And how does Matthew characterize Joseph's decision? It says Joseph, her fiance, was a good man and did not want to disgrace her publicly. So he decided to break the engagement quietly. See, that decision did not reflect strict obedience to the law, but it did reflect the very heart of God. James, Jesus' brother, writes, he says, Talk and act like a person expecting to be judged by the rule that sets us free. For if you refuse to act kindly, you can hardly expect to be treated kindly. Kind mercy wins over harsh judgment every time. A Jewish scholar once said to Jesus, and I know it's important to love him with all my heart and all my understanding and all my strength, and to love my neighbor as myself. This is more important than to offer all of the burnt offerings and sacrifices required in the law. Realizing how much the man understood, Jesus said to him, You are not far from the kingdom of God. Now, this won't be our main focus this morning, but there's one thing that Joseph teaches us, and it really helps us understand so much about God. Now, what I was taught growing up is that the Old Testament was the perfect will of God, how God wanted us to live, the Old Testament law especially was the perfect will of God, how God wanted us to live. Our problem is we just can't keep it, and so we need Jesus to make up for that as a sacrifice for us. Now the Old Testament does teach some about God, but the Old Law does not reflect God's perfect will. It doesn't. It reflects some of his will, it reflects some of man's bad thinking, it reflects a lot of teaching on personal hygiene. I mean, there's a lot of things that are part of the old law. But Jesus in Matthew 19, they were talking about divorce, and Jesus replied, Moses permitted divorce. He's talking about the Old Testament law on divorce. Moses permitted divorce only as a concession to your hard hearts, but it was not what God had originally planned. And so we go back and we read the old law and we're like, wow, this is what God really wants. You know, and God seems so schizophrenic, and we can't figure out how he can be so mean and cruel in the Old Testament and so loving and kind in the New Testament. And if we were honest with ourselves, it just doesn't really make sense. But the truth is the Old Testament law was not God's perfect will for man. We see his will for man from the very beginning, from the Garden of Eden. Mankind with a loving relationship with God, meaningful relationships with other people, meaningful work and responsibilities. And what God's desire, what God offered was the tree of life. Literally, life and love and intimacy and God's spirit pouring through them. And mankind chose. We said no thanks. We'll take the rules. Just give us the rules. The knowledge of good and evil. We'll do that. And that's what we got. That's what happened. That's what the law is. But the intention of the law was not to say, hey, this is the perfect way to live. The intention of the law was to get us back to the tree of life in relationship with the living God. Second Corinthians 3 and verse 6 says, He has enabled us to be ministers of his new covenant. This is a covenant not of written laws, but of the Spirit. The old written covenant ends in death, but under the new covenant, the Spirit gives life. So often when Jesus was accused of breaking the law, he's like, No, you don't understand. And he explains the heart of God, what God's intention was. And so one thing we see about Joseph is that he understands the heart of God. And first John 4 says, My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who's who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn't know the first thing about God. Because God is love. So you can't know Him if you don't love. So that's cool, isn't it? The second thing, and so Joseph understood. I mean, God handpicked a dad for Jesus. And Joseph understood the very heart of God. And God knew that he was going to be a great earthly dad for Jesus. There's a prophecy about Jesus. It says in Isaiah 42, it says, He will not crush the weakest reed or put out a flickering candle. That prophecy was about Jesus. But it sounds a lot like Joseph. Wasn't Mary a young, unwed, a pregnant girl? Was not she a weakest reed, a flickering candle? Joseph wouldn't put her out because he was a good man. And as far as earthly dads go, and can be, he was going to be a great dad. And Jesus was going to be raised in a kind and loving home. Well, Joseph is thinking about all these types of things and has decided what he's going to do, and his whole life changed in an instant. So as he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. Joseph, son of David, the angel said, Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit, and she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save the people from their sins. So Mary was pregnant, but she hadn't been unfaithful. They were both part of God's plan to save the world. That is found in the first few verses, maybe the first many verses of Matthew. It's Jesus' genealogy. Now here's some good news. We're not going to read it. But the point of the genealogy is pretty simple. It's a promise and a prophecy. The promise was to Abraham that through his seed all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The prophecies were that a righteous king was going to come from the lineage of King David. And so the point of the genealogy is to show that Jesus was a direct descendant of Abraham through the lineage of David. Luke also has a genealogy. Because Mary also descended from King David. Joseph from Solomon, the royal line, Mary from Nathan, another son of David. And that genealogy is probably included for several reasons. One is it gives women a new prominence, which was always God's intention. There's four women mentioned in the genealogy in Luke. And it also shows Jesus' connection to David through Mary, which is really how they should have done it. I mean, we do. When we look at our genealogies and we're tracing our family tree, we look at our grandfather, we look at our grandmother, and we go all the way back that way. But in that in their culture, the Jewish culture, that's not how they did it. And in the Jewish culture, there was a problem with Jesus' genealogy. Because Jewish genealogy was traced by bloodline. And Jesus was not part of Joseph's bloodline. Jesus did not have Joseph's physical DNA. And it's because Jesus was adopted. He was adopted by Joseph. We talked last week about the beauty surrounding that night in Bethlehem as we understand the whole story. And there's a similar beauty found in just this genealogy when we kind of see the whole story. See, God doesn't see things the way that we see them. And God knew the truth that Joseph was Jesus' dad. Not because of bloodline, but because of love. He was a loving man who loved and adopted Jesus. Dads and moms here, and there are many who have adopted children know exactly what we're talking about. Bloodline is not what's important, it's love. Joseph was Jesus' father on earth, and he loved him. Joseph named him Jesus, as the angel had told him. It is Joseph that the angel appears to shortly after his birth and tells him of Herod's plan to kill Jesus. And so they flee to Egypt. It is Joseph that the angels came to and said, Hey, it's safe now, you can go back. It's Joseph that was again woken up in a dream and said, Maybe not here. Herod's son now is in charge. So instead, maybe you should go to Nazareth, where they ended up. When Jesus was twelve years old, he ditches his parents for a couple of days. And he goes to the temple, and Mary scolds him just like any parent would do. And in Luke 2, it says, Son, his mother said to him, Why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been frantic, searching for you everywhere. See, Jesus was Joseph's son, not through a blood DNA. The DNA was love, a loving man who loved his son. And there's an amazingly consistent theme that you'll see all throughout the New Testament if you look for it. And that is that whatever Jesus asks us to do, he does first. He came so we could be adopted. Jesus didn't need to be adopted by God. He was God's son. But still, he would need to be adopted. He was adopted by Joseph, and they share the same DNA. Love. In Ephesians 1, it says, God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. Jesus gives each of us the opportunity to step out of our bloodline and into a family whose DNA is love. I was originally planning to talk about something different this morning. Last weekend I was preparing for last Sunday, and for some reason it just jumped out at me that Jesus was adopted by Joseph. You know, and so I thought that was interesting. I was thinking about that a little bit. Then after last Sunday we get done, um Bill Thrasher comes up to me and we're talking about Bethlehem. He goes, you know what's cool? That Jesus was adopted. I said, Yeah, I was kind of thinking about the same thing. And then Lisa comes up to me right after Bill, and she goes, You know what's what's kind of neat is how Jesus was adopted. So I started thinking how God arranges things, you know, and I'm thinking, well, maybe maybe we should talk a little bit about that Sunday. Um but I decided not to. And um but then in the middle of the week, I get an uh an email from Lisa, and it contained a very big thought. And so I wrote back and I asked Lisa if I could share the thought. And uh and here it is. As humans, we get caught up in the biological aspect of life and tend to forget that ultimately it is the love that we share that makes us family. Where would we all be if Joseph did not accept Jesus as his son? Or if Mary refused to be a surrogate for God? I'm starting to think that Ancestry.com is a real con job. What we all need to do is start our family tree with Mary and Joseph, work our way back to find our father, and forward to find our brother. Wow. I feel real good about my lineage. Can you imagine how different our family trees would look like if we based them on love? And what Lisa said is God's message to us through Jesus. God wants to be our father. Jesus wants to be our brother. But not only that, our whole family tree gets rearranged. And that's why the Bible calls us brothers and sisters. It's not just some lingo, it's a Family thing. And so I was thinking about that, and I had to kind of process that. I got the Lisa's email in the evening and I went to bed and slept and got up, and I was still kind of thinking about it. What would that look like? What if I literally redid my family tree based on love? You know, and so I actually started to write it out. And there's my father God, his spirit, Jesus, Susan, who's been the love of my life, you know, and then there's uh Paige and Andrew and Brighton and then closest friends and uh so many of you, and all the people in my life, uh throughout my life that I've loved and that have have loved me. And it didn't really look like a tree at all. But if it were a tree, it would be a tree of life. God and his love and his spirit, his son, meaningful relationships, doing meaningful work together. My new family tree was different than the way I'd always looked at it. You know, but my real family tree, we share a special DNA, and that DNA is love. A few final uh thoughts. If you're here and you've been physically adopted by a loving family, you share one more thing with Jesus, and that's pretty cool. If you're here and you've had crappy parents, you might feel like you got gypped. In fact, I know that you probably do. And and the problem when you when you have a bad situation with parents is it's not just that you feel like you got gypped, it's that it's like a life sentence. You know, and at some point, usually when we hit a certain age, we're like, man, I just gotta kind of accept this the way it is. And um I've got great news for you. Your genealogy has changed. You have a new family. You have a loving father who will do anything for you. He's already done anything for you. You may maybe you've never really felt loved in your family, but you are loved. You weren't short-changed. You don't have a crummy family. You have been adopted into a family that absolutely adores you. A few of you think that you're unlovable. If anyone really knew you, they could never love you. And it's not true. And if that struck a chord, I really need you to listen to me on this one. It's not true. There are people here who have probably not even met you and they already love you. And there's a God in heaven who has never stopped loving you. He hasn't given up on you, he's not mad at you. He wants to adopt you. He wants to adopt you. Love is his DNA. His plan has always been to adopt you as his very own child, to change your genealogy. You'll be so loved that your very DNA will start changing. And that DNA will be love. John said, this is how God showed his love for us. God sent his only son into the world so we might live through him. Jesus had a good man for an earthly father. He also had God Himself as His Father forever. And that really is the Christmas story. It is how God through this young baby offered to change our genealogy, offered to change the genealogy of every person adopted by God with a DNA that is love. So if the worship team will come up, we'll stop there. We'll get ready to celebrate, we'll sing one last song together. Let's stand. We'll get ready for that. You know, I mentioned how interesting it is, and you'll start probably seeing this as you think about it. But how Jesus always does everything he asks us to do first. You know, and so Jesus comes into the world as a baby, naked, dependent. So we can come to him naked, if you will, dependent. Here I am, God, I need you. I need your help. And then he scoops us up in his arms, adopts us as his very own child. Our spirit comes in live, we're created with the spirit, it comes alive. God's own spirit connects, and he starts changing us from the inside out, changes our whole lives as he transforms us from the inside out. Jesus came as a baby so we could become babies and be adopted into his very own family. So let's pray. Father, we praise you. Thank you for being such a great God, that each of us has such a loving family, such a loving father. And Jesus, we thank you for humbling yourself so much that you had come into our world as a child to give us this way to be part of your family, to show us what our Father is really like. We just thank you for that. And I ask you, God, for each of us here. We've got so many different things going on in our lives, we've got so many needs. I know you see them all. Please just bless each of us, whether it's health or help or relationships or peace, whatever it is we need. I just ask you to bless everybody here. And we love you and we thank you in Jesus' name. Amen.