Generation Upon Generation…
When reading the Gospel According to Matthew the first chapter begins with a long list of family heritage. Each name through 42 different generations is accounted. Probably a lot of us have never understood why there was all this time and effort afforded to listing out all these names, the “begotten of… and begotten of…” line after line. The importance of this exercise can not be overstated.
Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying,
Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son,
And they shall call his name Emmanuel,
which being interpreted is, God with us. Then Joseph being raised from sleep did as the angel of the Lord
had bidden him, and took unto him his wife: and knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son:
and he called his name JESUS. ~Matthew 1:22-25 KJB
We no longer have any understanding of who we are because we have no idea about our heritage past our grandparents and maybe our great-grandparents – the immediate past. It is in the full lineage that we begin to understand our identity as humans. It is our identity in Christ that will begin to manifest if we conduct such an exercise and lay out our heritage back to it’s roots. We will see God at work in our lives. We will have a deeper connection to our family, to our community and to God himself by simply knowing from where we came, from whom we originated. We all originated from God and that is the whole point. Trace it all the way to the very beginning. If you have a starting point, someone made it to start. That someone is God.
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We love helping others and believe that’s one of the reasons we are chosen as Ambassadors of the Kingdom, to serve God’s children. We look to the Greatest Commandment as our Powering force.
Jesus was born to save us from our sins. Jesus was born with the name Emmanuel, translated to mean “God with us.” What a beautiful name, Emmanuel, God with us. It just makes a person stop and pause for a moment to breathe in His name. Emmanuel, God with us. How did we ever come to deserve this life? How did we ever come to have such a loving God as this, that He would come down to meet us in the cesspool of our life to fish us out of the depths of hell and stand us on solid rock?
We get our identity from Jesus, who is Emmanuel, that He should know who we are in His kingdom. The first words in the Gospels, the good news, are concerned with identity in Jesus, the Christ, Emmanuel. It is that important.
Either the Gospel is the divine Word of God teaching us how to live and how to be a reflection of Him, or it’s nothing more than a historical account of events.
