Let’s pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for giving us faith.

Thank you for bringing us to worship you today. Thank you for being our God. Thank you for calling us your children. What an honor, and pleasure it is to be known and called a child of the most high God. As we think about your faithfulness, let us remember how you love us. It was by your love, you free us from our sins with your son’s blood shed on a cross. You made us into a kingdom of priests that glorify your name. Lord, let your glory be in us, and shine through us forever and ever. We wait for your second coming as we celebrate your victory over life and death. We pray these things in Jesus name. Amen.

Introduction

Today, we’re talking about faith. Particularly, we’re talking about what happens when faith slips through our fingers and is lost.

The author of the book of Hebrews says, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen…. And without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would draw near to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”

In simple terms, faith, then, is the knowledge of, trust in, and commitment to a relationship with God.

If that’s the definition of faith, then faith can be lost, stolen, or broken when the knowledge, trust, and commitment to the God is lost or the terms of our relationship with God change.

What does that look like? It looks like you doing all the right things to pursue God and be committed to God but experiencing all the wrong outcomes from that commitment and pursuit.

• Maybe you’re losing faith in God because the circumstances in your life tell you he doesn’t care.
• Or maybe you don’t feel His presence anymore.
• Maybe you’re reading your Bible, spending time in prayer, and serving others, but your life feels like it’s falling apart.

Does that leave you feeling anxious, frustrated, or resentful, and doubtful in your relationship with God? Perhaps, those are the reasons for your deconstruction of faith—not only questioning what you believe, who you believe in; but questioning if you actually believe anymore.

If that’s you right now, you are not alone. Deconstructing your faith, doubt in God, isn’t a new phenomenon, nor is it limited to a select few that wrestle with trusting Jesus. It’s actually something many heroes of faith go through and it’s written as the conflict in many of their stories.

Today, I’m talking to those of you who are struggling with faith in Jesus or know somebody struggling or having a crisis with their faith in Jesus.

Here’s the truth you want to hang on to in your doubts and deconstruction of faith: You are God’s child, and He is a loving Father. And that’ such good news for all of us who wrestle with faith or are losing faith, or are deconstructing faith, because God is faithful even when we’re not and when we can’t be. I’m thankful God is faithful even when I’m not in the right relationship with him. My prayer and hope is that if that’s any of us here, then the broken or lost faith we possess now will lead to a reconstructing of faith that is more generous, compassionate, hopeful, more trusting of God than previous.

That brings us to our text this morning. Open your Bibles to Matthew 1.

The prelude to the Christmas story in Matthew is a genealogy of Jesus. In writing this genealogy, Matthew is doing what a lot of historians would do, trying to establish lineage to prove kingship and establish rights. But I think Matthew included this genealogy for the Jewish people who are reading this who had deconstructed or lost their faith.

Just for context, all the hopes of being established as a kingdom set apart for God by God was lost. The last 400 years, not only did the nation of Israel not exist, the people of Israel were living as survivors of colonization by multiple nations, but now the Roman Empire. And through it all, silence from God. Meaning there was no relationship between God and his people since the book of Malachi, the last book in our Old Testament. The people of God had lots of reasons not to trust in God, and not to have faith in him, mainly because they had no relationship with him. So Matthew writes down these names to evoke history in their heritage—having a relationship with God, and to kick start faith where there is none because

Big Idea: Faith is built upon the integrity of a relationship

Our faith is only as strong as our relationship with the person or thing we have faith in. Without relationship, there can be no faith.

When we read this list of names, we are reminded that the integrity of our relationship with God isn’t caused by anything we do on our own or any of our own faith, but rather, that despite our lack of integrity in our relationship with God, or lack of faith, God is still faithful to the relationship he establishes with the sinful people he calls to be his children.

Today, as we study this genealogy, I’m going to point out how some of these people, and how they had lost their faith in their journey with God, and yet God still proved to be faithful and consequently, gave faith to the faithless. Moreover, I’m going to show you how Jesus is the culmination of God’s faithfulness to faithless people.

Matthew 1:1

¹The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

² Abraham was the father of Isaac, and Isaac the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Judah and his brothers, ³ and Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar, and Perez the father of Hezron, and Hezron the father of Ram, ⁴ and Ram the father of Amminadab, and Amminadab the father of Nahshon, and Nahshon the father of Salmon, ⁵ and Salmon the father of Boaz by Rahab, and Boaz the father of Obed by Ruth, and Obed the father of Jesse, ⁶ and Jesse the father of David the king. (Matthew 1:1-6a ESV)

Three names stand out as different in this genealogy. Those names are Tamar, Rahab, and Ruth. They are all women. But more notably, none of these women were originally part of the family of Abraham. They had no relationship with God. But are included in this genealogy of faith because they were grafted into the family tree of God’s people because they decided to leave behind everything, their families, their religions, their past experiences, to trust in our God.

In Genesis 12, God says to Abraham, leave your family, your country, and everything you know and follow me in relationship and in return, I will promise to do three things:

• Make you into a great nation
• Give you an inheritance of land for your children
• God’s own purpose of blessing the entire world will be through your offspring.

The conclusion Matthew wants us, who are struggling to believe, is this: God saves the people he chooses by His own sovereign grace. God’s promise to Abraham is not a product of Abraham. Nor does God’s promises come from the faithfulness of anybody in Abraham’s lineage. It was despite Abraham’s lineage and sinfulness that God still fulfills his promise to Abraham. God saves because of the integrity of his relationship with the people who chooses. He is their God period. 

• In Genesis 15, God had done incredible things in Abraham’s life, giving him riches and blessings.
  • But Abraham looking at all that he has tells God, what’s the point of all this, I still don’t have any kids. I have nobody to pass this blessing down to except this foreigner who happens to be my servant.
  • God responds, you will have kids, just wait for me, your heirs will be of your own flesh and blood.
• So Abraham and his wife Sarah take matters into their own hands, and in Genesis 16, Abraham gets his wife’s slave, Hagar pregnant.
  • Have you ever lost faith in God’s promises for you, so you go and try to microwave solution for yourself thinking that’s what God wants?
  • That’s what Abraham and Sarah do and the logic behind it is very much flawed. Sarah and Abraham instantly regret it.
• In Genesis 17, God tells Abraham, this son born to Hagar, that’s not the child I wanted to bless you with.
  • He already had one kid and God says, that’s not it. So in his doubt, Abraham says, “God, I’m 100 years old, my wife Sarah is 90, she can’t have any kids.”
  • This is what God says to Abraham and Sarah in Genesis 18 – “Sarah, why are you laughing? I’m not joking. Is anything too hard for the Lord?”
• In Genesis 21, God, despite Abraham and Sarah’s disbelief, and in their old age, have a son, Isaac.

What Abraham’s story teaches us is that, even if we don’t trust God to deliver, because of who he is, he is faithful even when we can’t be and won’t be. Our faith, our trust can be in God who fulfills his promises.

Point 1. Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham

Verse 6.

And David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah, ⁷ and Solomon the father of Rehoboam, and Rehoboam the father of Abijah, and Abijah the father of Asaph, ⁸ and Asaph the father of Jehoshaphat, and Jehoshaphat the father of Joram, and Joram the father of Uzziah, ⁹ and Uzziah the father of Jotham, and Jotham the father of Ahaz, and Ahaz the father of Hezekiah, ¹⁰ and Hezekiah the father of Manasseh, and Manasseh the father of Amos, and Amos the father of Josiah, ¹¹ and Josiah the father of Jechoniah and his brothers, at the time of the deportation to Babylon. (Matthew 1:6b-11 ESV)

Let’s look at the first name on this list, David. Despite God’s relationship with David, David still broke faith. In verse 6, Matthew says “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” The reason it is written this way is not to dehumanize Bethsheba, that’s the wife of Uriah, but rather to point out the sinfulness of David. To make the point that he was not faithful to God. Despite all that God did and was doing in his life, David put his faith to the wayside. You can find this story in its entirety in 2 Samuel 11, but here are the highlights:

• In the spring, David, instead of being a good king and going out to war decided to stay at home.
• When he was home and not working, he was peeping around and saw a beautiful woman bathing.
• He started asking around who this woman he was peeping on was.
• Knowing full well that she was married to somebody else, and that sleeping with her is a violation of God’s law, he slept with her anyways.  
• Then he tried to cover up the affair by having her husband, who was at war on behalf of David, to come home and fill his marital obligations, because David got Bethsheba pregnant after a one-night stand.
• But Uriah was a good guy, he didn’t want to dishonor his brothers who were at war and away from their wives and families. And when the cover up failed because David’ soldier, Uriah was honorable, David had Uriah murdered in cold blood, under the guise of war.

Let me tell you how unfaithful David was, David heard something like that had happened in his kingdom, and in his hypocrisy, he cursed that type of man before God and condemned himself to death before God. David was broken and sinful. He did horrible things in the name of faith and out of not having faith. But God forgave David for his faithless treachery.

The kings listed in this paragraph after David, they were all horrible kings. They were horrible because they couldn’t manage the kingdom administratively, or politically, number one; but number two, they all decided to turn away from their relationship with God. Each of their stories culminates with deciding to abandon their faith in God. They replaced their relationship with God for something else, for someone else. Each successive king having less faith and acting more faithless toward God than the last. Yet, God, despite his people leaving him remains faithful.

You may have committed egregious sins in your life, but I very much doubt it is a rebellion at the level of King David, nor is it at the level of any of these people listed in paragraph. You may be in a place on your journey of faith where God doesn’t seem present, or you’re struggling because there is a disconnect with the God want to trust with the God who you should trust. but God has been, is, and always will be the same. He has not changed, we have.  Return to God, seek a relationship with your unchanging God. He remains undeterred from blessing you with his love. God proves his faithfulness by giving us:

Point 2. Jesus, the legacy king promised to David (vv7-11)

The title, Christ, or Messiah, we saw in verse 1, rightly applies to Jesus because Jesus is not only a descendant of God’s anointed king, David, but he is the one who would powerfully deliver God’s people into a right relationship with God through his life, death, and resurrection. David, nor any of the other kings behind him could not do this. The first century Jewish people reading this genealogy know that all other so called Messiahs have failed to deliver. In Jesus, Matthew is telling them to think back to 2 Samuel 7 and the promise God made to David.

“¹² When your days are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. ¹³ He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. ¹⁴ I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, ¹⁵ but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. ¹⁶ And your house and your kingdom shall be made sure forever before me. Your throne shall be established forever.’” (2 Samuel 7:12-16 ESV)

• In verse 12, we find God’s promise to David – according to Matthew, this is Jesus.
• In verse 13, we see the mission of Jesus—that his life’s work, his work in death, and his work in resurrection is to establish God’s kingdom here and now that will extend into eternity.
• In verse 14, we understand the relationship between God, the Father, and Jesus, who is his one and only son.
  • We also see the foreshadowing of the punishment Jesus will suffer on the cross on behalf of the people he is in relationship with.
• Then in verse 15, we understand the integrity of God’s love being manifested in reality. The everlasting love of God on display through Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
  • In Jesus’ resurrection, Jesus, the descendant of the throne of David, the son of God, reigns now and forevermore in the kingdom he establishes for the people he chose to die for.

We can have relationship with God because our faith is built on the foundation and integrity of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and because of his relationship with his father. All things God does for us because his relationship with Jesus. In Jesus, our anointed one, he is our way, and our truth, and the life we seek. If we know Jesus, we know God, the Father, also. Through a relationship with king Jesus, we have a relationship with the Father (John 14:6-7). And the integrity of our relationship with God is not dependent on our abilities, or our activities, or our faith, but on who Jesus is and what he did for us.

Just because we lose faith in God, and our relationship with God is not what it should be, or if we have a hard time believing and trusting in God, then look at the person and work of Jesus. He is the king who gave up his own life so that we could have a life with God, the father.

Back to Matthew 1, verse 12.

¹² And after the deportation to Babylon: Jechoniah was the father of Shealtiel, and Shealtiel the father of Zerubbabel, ¹³ and Zerubbabel the father of Abiud, and Abiud the father of Eliakim, and Eliakim the father of Azor, ¹⁴ and Azor the father of Zadok, and Zadok the father of Achim, and Achim the father of Eliud, ¹⁵ and Eliud the father of Eleazar, and Eleazar the father of Matthan, and Matthan the father of Jacob, ¹⁶ and Jacob the father of Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born, who is called Christ.

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. (Matthew 1:12-17 ESV)

Connecting the dots between verse 11 and verse 12, after hundreds of years of history in relationship, the people of God decide they don’t want a relationship with God anymore even though God was faithful and they were not in their relationship with him. Matthew picks up in verse 12 where God restores the broken relationship with his people and we find a man named Zerubbabel in the middle of that relationship restoration.

Zerubbabel is the governor of Judah under the king of Babylon. He tries to rebuild a relationship with God through his faithful actions and obedience to God’s commands as taught by the prophets. But what we learn from Zerubbabel’s life is that seeking after God in faith is not easy. Immediately, as he pursues faith and reconstructing a relationship with God, suddenly every person is against him. He is accused of being a traitor. His faith puts him at odds with the world and culture at large. The book of Nehemiah and Ezra document the hardships of faith. You see, having faith is not all rainbows and sunshine. There is hardship too. But look at how God encourages Zerubbabel’s faithfulness in trying to rebuild a relationship with God.

²¹ “Speak to Zerubbabel, governor of Judah, saying, I am about to shake the heavens and the earth, ²² and to overthrow the throne of kingdoms. I am about to destroy the strength of the kingdoms of the nations, and overthrow the chariots and their riders. And the horses and their riders shall go down, every one by the sword of his brother. ²³ On that day, declares the Lord of hosts, I will take you, O Zerubbabel my servant, the son of Shealtiel, declares the Lord, and make you like a signet ring, for I have chosen you, declares the Lord of hosts.”

(Haggai 2:21-23 ESV)

If you’re feeling distant in relationship with God, if your faith doesn’t seem to be going in the right direction because life’s circumstances doesn’t express God’s blessings on your life, then know that He is not absent from you. He is nearer than you think. Call out to God with whatever faith you have. Bring Him your pain, your frustration, and your unmet expectations. God cares, He sees, and He will encourage you and affirm you like he did with Zerubbabel, by moving and shaking the world around you and giving you a faith like God’s own signet ring.

A signet ring is a sign of a king’s authority. When God says he will make us a signet ring, he is saying that our faith, the marks of our faith, the things that we do in faith, will have his authority. This offer of authority goes beyond receiving forgiveness from sins against God; it’s actually a declaration of the close relationship between God and the people he calls his children.

Matthew wants us, who lack faith, are wrestling with faith, and have lost faith to know that our faith is built on the integrity of God’s relationship with men and women in the Bible who lacked, wrestled, struggled, and lost faith at times in their journey with God. God’s infinite love for those he calls, he was and continues to be faithful even when doubts, crises and difficult circumstances arise in their lives. The genealogy culminates with the blessings, authority, and promises to his people being found in Jesus, the Christ.

Point 3. Jesus is the Messiah who restores relationships (vv12-17)

The purpose of a Messiah is to restore our relationship with God even when we are questioning, doubting, and deconstructing our faith. God bestows upon all who trust in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection as the source of their faith an authority that comes from being an heir to the most high God. Through Jesus, God not only forgives, He redeems, He blesses, and He also restores.  

If you’re losing faith, or if you’ve lost faith in God, look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith in God. He is the Messiah sent to restore our faith by being the fulfillment the promises made by God to his people. Jesus is the blessing of our lives that restores our faith in God no matter where we are on our journey of faith. In him, we have an integrity in our relationship with God that cannot be broken.   

Let’s pray.

Father, restore our relationship with you. Make our relationship with you stronger than it ever was this Christmas season. If this is a time of struggling in faith, or doubting, Lord, let us look at the history of our faith, our genealogy written here in Matthew, because God this is our spiritual family, and let us remember how you have been and always will be faithful to the people you call to be your children. Lord, as your children, let us trust in you deeply, let us rely on you for all of our lives. As we encounter a world that tells us not to trust anybody or anything, let us trust you more and more because you are our Father, and you sent us the Messiah, Jesus, who redeems all broken things to you, for your goodness, for your glory. Make our faith a signet ring we can wear as the authority we have as your children. We worship you because we know who you are and believe you are our God. In Jesus name. Amen.