Advent Season: God is in This Story

 The season of Advent is my favorite time of year. I love everything about it. The anticipation for Christ, Advent Calendars, Christmas Decorations, Advent Studies, and where my devotional heart goes this time of year. This season I am teaching a Bible Study on the book of Matthew, and doing an Advent Study using some of the women from the Bible. Week 1 is the story of Tamar. Never would I have chosen her to start a study that leads to Christ, and yet for that reason, she is the perfect place to start. 

Tamar has a very broken story in the Bible. She is married to one of Judah's sons. He is not a good man and doesn't treat her well, God takes care of him. Then in Jewish tradition, she is married to his brother, and the story is much the same. He refuses to give her children because he doesn't want his brother to get credit for any sons. So God takes care of him too. Leaving her a widow x2. Judah sends her home to live a widow's life until the third son is old enough to marry her. Time passes and he never fulfills his promise. She takes matters into her own hands and tricks Judah into sleeping with her. She gets pregnant and with this child enters the lineage of Jesus Christ. 

In Youth Group we talked about the different characters in the Christmas Story. The figurines we set on our mantle this time of year in our Nativities. 

• Shepherds: This wasn't a job that essential people held. It was a job for the least of these, they lived with the sheep and would have been dirty and smelly.
• Magi: These guys weren't even Jewish. They didn't believe in God or follow any belief system that looks like Jesus. They likely believed in magic and astrology, they were tracking stars. Definitely outsiders. 
• Joseph: a carpenter, nothing too special. Just a man willing to live by his convictions over the law.
• Mary: a young, virgin, betrothed, yet pregnant. 

In Matthew 1 we find the lineage of Jesus, these people were considered an important part of his story. Lineages were used to show how important someone was, and they typically leave out any of the black sheep of the family. We find Tamar, Rahab, Bathsheba, and many more that have a history not fit for the King of Kings. 

If you break any part of the story of Christ apart you find brokenness, but when we put it all together and read the story as a whole we find love and grace. God could have chosen anyone and any way to bring the promised Messiah, he could have chosen the best of the best to be a part of Jesus' story. But he didn't. He chose broken sinful humans, and by choosing them he redeemed their stories.

Week one of Advent is Hope. These characters, these people bring us hope. There is nothing that we can go through in this life that writes us out of Christ's story. 

God loves us in our stinky shepherd clothes. 

God loves us even when we look to the stars to fix our problems.

God loves us when we are ordinary people living ordinary lives.

God loves us when we are called beyond the world's standards and the deck is stacked against us.

God loves us when we come from broken marriages and homes.

God loves us when no one else does. 

God loves us when we take matters into our own hands.

God loves us when we sin majorly and cause others pain. 

God loves us on the mountaintops.

God loves us in the valleys. 

The world doesn't define your story. God does. When we are stuck in the middle of something ugly and painful it is hard to see any good in the story. But God is there, and he is molding those moments into His story with love and grace. Don't lose heart, God is in THIS story.

God is in This Story - Katy Nichole & Big Daddy Weave