My Dysfunctional Family: Judah and Tamar - Audio
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>> All right. Welcome, welcome, welcome. I'm Tom and lead pastor here at coast. If you're new or visiting, we are super glad you're here. If you are new, we just completed like four weeks on marriage. And so all of the relationships in our congregation are now perfect. And so if you are new, if you are new, you need to go to our website and watch all of those videos on our YouTube channel and fix your relationships. So today we're starting my dysfunctional family. It's our holiday series, our Christmas series. And it's -- well, I don't know, especially this year, right? So we had that election. And I feel like it's actually less, I don't know, crazy than it was in 2020, which surprises me, but I'm very grateful for it. Nevertheless, I don't think a certain part of our family invited us to be with them for Thanksgiving. Now we wouldn't have gone anyway. We couldn't have. We had other plans. But I suspect it's because they think that, you know, they think that I vote a certain way and they vote a certain way. And I'm guessing they don't want to deal with someone who they think is different politically. So that's something that's a little bit dysfunctional in my family. And I think all of us, if we -- and we'll talk more about it in a minute, but I think all of us recognize this is the time of the year where as much as we do get excited, as Doug said, about Advent, about Christmas, and the kids are pumped. And we had -- did everyone have a fantastic Thanksgiving dinner? I mean, wow, I helped my brother-in-law cut the turkey. And the reason I do that is not because he's bad at it, but because I have two Thanksgiving meals. The first one is when I'm picking the pieces of the turkey off as he's cutting them. And I eat maybe two pieces of turkey and then put one on the plate for everyone else. And so that's my first meal. And then I have the regular meal. So it was awesome. It was great. But, but, but. This can also be the time of year that compresses and causes to explode some of the cracks, some of the pressures, some of the dysfunctionality of Christmas. And so we're going to -- we're going to do an interesting way. Take a look at our kind of our theme verse of the series. It's here. It's Matthew one. Okay. This is the genealogy of Jesus, the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham. That's our verse of the month. I think it's in our bulletin. But we -- so check this out. Here's a famous painting of the nativity, right? And look how nice it is. Like, and even the songs we sing joy to the world, you know, which is a lovely song. It's amazing. We might start to think that we don't measure up, right? You want a perfect family? Jesus, right? He's the son of God. His family must be awesome. What we're going to find out in this series is that it's absolutely not. The interesting thing about the genealogy in Matthew is Matthew includes all of the ancestors of Jesus about whom he might be a little bit embarrassed. And we're going to look into their lives a little bit and we're going to start to see the kind of dysfunction that surrounded Jesus' family, his lineage. And then we are going to see what we can do about that dysfunction. Now, I do want to make a -- just to announce what I have yet. If you have younger children in the -- in here today, the dysfunction is serious. It involves -- it involves sex. It involves bad sex. And so I just want to throw that out there in case you want to make sure to get your kids to Sunday school or something like that. But I will keep it as -- as -- as PG-13 as possible for something that is a rated R-text. But the first thing in our note, Jesus is this. Every family, even Jesus, is dysfunctional. Every family, even Jesus, is dysfunctional. And so to start out, why not just take -- ask a couple of questions about your family, okay? What relationships in your family are dysfunctional right now and maybe have been for years, go ahead, name it. And then ask yourself the question, do you believe there's a possibility that that might change? And if so, how? Because that's going to animate this entire series, right? We're going to -- we're going to be looking for ways in which our dysfunctional families, just like Jesus' can be redeemed. And so let's go back to that Matthew text. Notice this. Okay, so Jesus is the Messiah. That means he's the anointed one. He's the special one. He's the son of David, son of Abraham. Abraham's the father of Isaac. Isaac's the father of Jacob. Jacob's the father of Judah and his brothers. Judah is the father of Perez, whose mother was Tamar. We read that like, okay, yeah, whatever, cool. So Judah and Tamar had a kid. That's awesome. Is it? Let me take you back to Genesis 38. And I want you to see how messed up this family is. At that time, Judah left his brothers and went down to stay with a man of a
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Every family is dysfunctional. Judgment without mercy is dysfunctional. Mercy without judgment is dysfunctional. Only Jesus' judgment and mercy make us fully functional.