Last night I spoke from Matthew 1:1-17 – a passage well worth preaching.  The first thing to ask is:  Why does the most exciting book in history — the New Testament — open with a genealogy?  I’d never think of beginning one of my books with a long list of hard-to-pronounce names.  My publishers wouldn’t allow it.  Why, then, would a book as vital as the New Testament begin with something as “dull” as a genealogy?

I’ll give you ten reasons:

1. To show us that Jesus Himself cuts through the Old Testament like a Grand Canyon.  Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament Covenants, the Old Testament Heroes, and the Old Testament prophecies.  The story of the Old Testament is not a general history of ancient Israel but a particular history of one family line within Israel—the family from which the Messiah descended.  All of Jewish history prepared the way for His birth.
2. God takes the long view. This genealogy covers 2000 years.  God was patiently preparing the way for Christ to come again.  We always need to be long-viewed where God is concerned.
3. The Messiah is universal.  He is the Savior for both men and women.  Five women are included in His family tree, which is highly unusual in ancient genealogical records.  He’s also the Savior of both Jews and Gentiles, for several non-Jewish names are in this account.
4.  God’s Grace is spelled JESUS.  Notice the five women mentioned:  Tamar seduced her father-in-law through prostitution; Rahab was a prostitute; Ruth was a Moabite, Uriah’s wife was an adulterer.  Only Mary had a respectable record.  Among the men on the list are some of the most wicked and defiled characters in the Old Testament.  As one commentator said, “The lineage is comprised of men, women, adulterers, prostitutes, heroes, and Gentiles—and Jesus will be Savior of all.”
5.  Jesus Christ is supernatural.  His genealogy begins and ends with a supernatural birth.  At the beginning of the line was Abraham whose son was a miracle baby; and at the end of the line was Jesus who was born of the virgin Mary.
6. Jesus is God-Man.  Matthew 1 divides into two parts.  The first part (v. 1-17) stresses His human descent.  The last part (v. 18-24) stresses His divine conception.
7. We’re all part of a chain reaction of blessings.  Just as every name on the list brought Jesus Christ to the world, each of us is part of the chain of bringing the news of Christ to the world.
8. There are no “nobodies” in God’s lineup.  In verse 3, we have two names — Hezron and  Ram – of whom we know nothing.  But there were not nothings; they were forbearers of the Messiah.  We may not achieve any fame or fortune in the world, but God can mightily use us.
9. God’s Plan is Perfect.  Matthew summarizes the genealogy of Christ into three groups of fourteen, dividing Jewish history into three broad phrases.  Fourteen is seven times two, and seven is the number of God’s completed work.  Three is the number of God Himself.  In Jesus Christ God was fulfilling His perfect plan for human history. 
10. History has hope because God is in control and Jesus in coming.
     

Hope you can join us tomorrow at The Donelson Fellowship – 8:45 & 10:15.  Here’s a preview of the message:

The genius of this Psalm is its simplicity.  Everyone is longing for the simple life.  In an age of complexity and confusion, we all want to simplify, simplify.  And nothing’s simpler than Psalm 23.  Here’s a Condensed Version of this chapter:

• Beside Me:  My Shepherd
• Beneath Me:  Green Pastures
• Near Me:  Quiet Waters
• Before Me:  Righteous Paths
• Within Me:  Restored Spirits
• Against Me:  My Enemies
• For Me:  His rod and staff
• Around Me:  A Tableland
• Upon Me:  Anointing Oil
• Above Me:  Overflowing Blessings
• Behind Me:  Goodness and Mercy
• In Front of Me:  The House of the Lord

 Today — Thanksgiving Day – we can thank God for the intangibles:  Joy, Faith, Hope, Love. 

One of my favorite places in the world is Notre Dame in Paris, which, to me, is much more beautiful on the outside than on the inside.  The interior is dim and lined with never-ending tourists.  But the outside is bright and gothic, sitting like an ornament along the Seine.  It’s beautiful, in part, because of its elegant “flying buttresses.”  They aren’t an original part of the design, but as workers built the nave, the thin walls (popular in gothic architecture) showed signs of stress. The walls were pushed outward by the weight of the structure, and the cathedral’s architects faced a crisis.  How could they brace up the walls without ruining the appearance of their masterpiece?  The answer:  flying buttresses.

I think of the intangibles – joy, hope, faith – as the flying buttresses of the soul.  They prop up our emotions, support our spirits, and keep us pointing upward toward the Lord.

Today we can thank God for the intangibles!

In the providence of God, in the very year I began pastoring The Donelson Fellowship, Dr. W. A. Criswell published a book called Criswell’s Guidebook for Pastors.  That red-jacketed book had a formative effect on me and my work.  Chapter 3 was entitled “The Pastor in His Study.”  Here’s the way it began:

There is a theme in my life that I refer to again and again.  Like the motif in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that is sounded over and over and heard in a dozen different parts and variations, so the basic, underlying persuasion of my own pastoral work is this:  Keep your mornings for God….

I keep my mornings for God and I have my study at home.  There is a telephone on my desk, but it does not ring.  At night in the quietness of the shining stars and of the soft gloom of the evening, I can work and study and prepare.  In my morning I can walk into my workshop and there slave at my desk to my heart’s content.

I can pray and I can prepare my sermons.  I can write books.  I can think through the problems that confront us. I can live the life of a king in a castle in my study with its thousands of theological books and with its afforded opportunity to escape from the pressure of the world.  Nobody there but God, and He is waiting for my arrival whenever I come.

When I leave the study, I try to be the servant of the church and of the world.  I visit. I answer letters.  I go to meetings.  I preach.  I hold funerals and weddings.  I administer the affairs of the congregation.  I try to help with my denomination.  I do a thousand other things.  But the time I spend in my study is mine and God’s.  That has extended my ministry and has blessed my life; it is the secret of the enormous amount of work I am able to do….

If I had one thing to tell a young preacher, it would be this:  “Keep the mornings for God.  Shut out the whole world and shut up yourself to the Lord with a Bible in your hand, with your knees bended in the presence of the holiness of the great Almighty.”

W. A. Criswell, Criswell’s Guidebook for Pastors (Nashville:  Broadman Press, 1980), 59-60.

  When I was starting out in pastoral work, I looked up to Dr. W. A. Criswell, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, as a model.  Criswell was in a class by himself.  He’d been the leading pastor among Southern Baptists for over fifty years, and he was known for his exposition of Scripture.  He once preached a 17-year sermon series through the whole Bible. 

I met him on one occasion.  Morris Proctor and I attended the First Baptist Church in Dallas in the early 1980s.  We got there early, sat on the front row, and took it all in.  Afterward at a reception for visitors we met the inimitable Criswell. 

“Dr. Criswell,” I asked, “in all your years of ministry, have you ever gotten discouraged.” 

He leaned back and smiled and boomed: “World without end!” 

“Well, what do you do about it?” I asked. 

He said something to this effect:  “I always find that the discouragement is something that is in me.  It’s not in the circumstances; they’re under God’s control.  It’s not in the Lord; He’s never discouraged.  So it’s just an unhelpful emotion that gets inside of me; and so I just have to give myself a little tme to push it back out, and I keep on going.”

That was all he had time to say, but it was enough.

Thank you, Dr. C!

In Sunday’s sermon at TDF, we’re coming to Psalm 23:5, which says:  “You anoint my head with oil.”  Here’s an excerpt.  For the whole message, click here: 

One day when I was checking on our sheep, I was alarmed to find that the horse had taken a serious bite out of Ethel’s ear. I didn’t see it happen, but there was no doubt that a good portion of Ethel’s ear had been torn away by the horse’s teeth. At first I didn’t know what to do, but I thought of this verse of Scripture. Grabbing a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen, I washed Ethel’s ear and rubbed that olive oil into the wound. It seemed to sooth her, and after several treatments, the wound healed. Later as I was talking to a sheep farmer about it, he said, “Oh, yes, that’s a little trick we use at livestock shows. If we’re showing a sheep and she gets a nick or a cut, we rub a little olive oil on it, and it does the trick.” 

The Good Shepherd is alert to various hurts and cuts and problems they have. He anoints them with oil.  The Lord knows how to heal our hurts and bind our wounds. He rubs the soothing oil of His grace and of the Holy Spirit onto the rough spots of life.   Oil is a constant symbol in the Bible of the Holy Spirit.

The next time you think you have an excuse why God can’t use you, consider the following:  Noah was a drunkard, Abraham was too old, Isaac was a daydreamer, Jacob was a liar, Leah was ugly, Joseph was abused, Moses was a murderer, Gideon was afraid, Samson had long hair, Rahab was a prostitute, Timothy was too young, David had an illicit affair, Elijah was suicidal, Isaiah preached naked, Job was bankrupt, John the Baptist ran around in a loin-cloth and ate locusts, Peter has hot-tempered, John was self-righteous.  The disciples fell asleep while praying, Martha fretted about everything, Mary Magdalene was demon-possessed, the boy with the fish and five rolls of bread was too obscure, the Samaritan woman was divorced more than once, Zacchaeus was too small, Paul was too religious, and Lazarus was dead.  No more excuses!

Author unknown, quoted (quoted by Jan Karon in A Continual Feast (NY: Viking Press, 2005), unnumbered page).

When I got up this morning, I faced a deadline on a major article for the Billy Graham Association; and to be honest, I hadn’t even started it.  It had to be done today.

Desperate measures were required.

After praying and committing the project to the Lord, I turned to I-Tunes and downloaded the entire Brandenburg Concerto as performed by the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields.  It’s been playing softly all day, and it worked.  The article’s done, and between the Holy Spirit and Johann Sebastian, I was amply inspired.

As Bach would say:  SDG:  Soli Deo Gloria.

Today’s sermon at The Donelson Fellowship is from Psalm 23:4, where we find the name of an intriguing slice of geography – The Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Think about that title.  It is not the Valley of Death — not Death Valley.  There’s a Death Valley in California, but not in Psalm 23.  In biblical geography, there’s only the valley of the shadow of death.

There’s a lot of difference between an object and its shadow.  Sure, there are some similarities, but the differences are greater than the comparisons. 

Let me give you an example.  Last year when Joshua Rowe and I went to Italy, we traveled everywhere by train.  We stood waiting on the platform many times.  Sometimes as the train approached the station, it would slow down.  I’d be hit by the shadow of a train traveling at 5 or 10 miles an hour, but I was never hurt.  Sometimes we’d see a train coming, and it wouldn’t stop at our station.  It was an express train, and it whizzed by much faster.  I’d be hit by a shadow going 100 miles an hour, but I didn’t suffer any injuries. 

Once while traveling in Japan I was hit by the shadow of a bullet train traveling 300 miles an hour.  Now, you’d think I might have been hurt, and I’ll have to say it was a little frightening — the roar and the power and the wind and the sound of it all.  But I was untouched.  No broken bones.  No cuts or bruises.  It’s remarkable to think about.  A human being—even a child—can be hit head-on by a shadow going hundreds of miles an hour, and not suffer the slightest bruise.

Jesus was hit by the freight train of God’s wrath for sin as He hung on the cross.  He endured the collision; He died from His injuries; He took the blow full force.  Consequently, we only have to deal with the shadow. 

There’s no such thing as death for the Christian.  There is only the shadow of death.  We don’t experience death; we experience its shadow, for Christ endured the real thing at Calvary—and rose again!  And that’s why the valley between the green pastures and the Father’s House is simply the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

I’ve visited Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, and it’s a beautiful spot with quaint chapels, prayer gardens, and the fabulous painting of the crucifixion of Christ displayed in a churchlike theater on the crest of the hill (it’s the largest oil painting in the world, and worth a visit).  But I’m amazed at the excess that would spend a million dollars for a funeral there.  That’s more than the net worth of most Americans.  According to TMZ, to slide Michael Jackson into his slot in the mausoleum, it cost, in dollars:

• 175,000 – Police support
• 590,000 – Internment
• 88,500 – Mausoleum upkeep
• 176,000 – Private security, lighting, and to rent a baby grand piano
• 3,600 – Framing a photo of Michael to place beside the casket
• 1,975 – Wardrobe for the family
• 125 – The flower van.

Personally, I think the flower van people undercharged for their services, but the framing people made up for it.  But the overlooked fact is that Michael was just as dead after the million dollars was spent as he was before.  It’s not the cost of our funerals but the quality of our lives that counts.  It’s not the fame of our name but the name of our Lord that makes the difference in eternity.  Better to die in Christ and be buried in Potter’s Field than to tumble into eternity without Him and be buried in a shrine.