Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You King of Your Life? | Advent | Matthew 1:12-17

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

Do want the promises of Jesus without the allegiance to Jesus? Who is the ruler of your life? What do you base decisions on? Do you have a right view of Jesus? In today's episode, Tanya looks at Matthew 1:12-17 to describe the right way to honor and submit to Jesus. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter@TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. And the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmeth. Sometimes we come across something in scripture that sounds like it. It's probably pretty important, but we don't really know why. And we know we need to give our full attention to it, but we might not understand what we're supposed to get out of it. This is especially the case when things are repeated, and this is what happened to me when I was reading the geology of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. So at the end of the list of names, Matthew starts in Abraham and he goes all the way to Jesus.

He wraps up his genealogy in chapter 1, verse 17, like this. He says, thus there were 14 generations in all from Abraham to David, 14 from David to the exile to Babylon, and 14 from the exile to the Messiah. Now, there's lots of important information there about how the promise given to Abraham and the promised Messiah that would come from David are being carried through to the arrival of Jesus. But the original audience also would have understood the importance of the number 14. In the first century, letters were used in place of numbers. So each letter also represented something numeric.

For example, the letter D stood in place also for the number four. So if you had a word with two Ds in it, you would add them together to. get eight. The letter W represented a six. David's name in Hebrew was spelled D-W-D. So that would be four plus six plus four, which equals 14. Matthew's focus on 14 generations emphasizes Jesus kingship. Matthew shows that Jesus is the legal claim to the throne of David. Now why is this important? So one of the frustrations people had in the Old Testament was that they were looking for a king from the wrong place. They were looking at the world to solve their problems, and they kept thinking the next person would be the one who would fix their political issues, and the next person

would be the one that would restore them to power. And this is the kind of king they were waiting for. But as we read the Old Testament, it's nudging us to see how we can't look to the world to solve our biggest problem because it's a heart problem. We have a problem with sin and it can't be fixed by any worldly king no matter how fabulous. So we're starting to understand that we're waiting for a king that is not of this world and Matthew is saying here he is. Jesus is the king you've been waiting for. He comes from human lineage and he comes to do everything we were destined to do but could not. and he comes as a king and his kingship

well that should have our full attention so we just talked about how the Old Testament is just repeatedly pulling at this thread that looking at the world to solve our problems is not a solution it's a game of less than and it ends in frustration and disappointment

yet over and over we watch the people in the Old Testament give their allegiance to less than things and their problems never solved. So this tension points us to the good news, or the gospel of Jesus Christ. He is the king, who will deliver them, who delivers us, not from military power, but from a bigger problem called sin. So when we read the gospels, we tend to think of a baby, and we tend to think of a loving

Jesus that we should ask into our hearts. And those are true. In fact, right now I'm thinking about an oil painting in the church where I grew up, where Jesus is standing behind a door knocking, as if he has to wait for the person on the other side because he's helpless until they open the door. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong. Art is one way that we try to illustrate what scripture is saying, but that image describes where I was in my thinking of Jesus. But the Jesus that Matthew was preparing our hearts for is a king, the true king, the the better king, the perfect king, the eternal king. When we talk about sharing the gospel or the good news with someone,

it often sounds like those nice little images we just talked about. Ask Jesus into your heart so you can go to heaven. But maybe we don't get around to the part about how Jesus is the king that requires all our allegiance. And maybe we don't really want to, because we don't want to have to change the way we're living. our lives. Maybe we want the promises of Jesus without having to give our allegiance to Jesus. But Paul married those two ideas together when he talked about the gospel. See, Paul only used the

word gospel three times in the New Testament. And two of those three times, he also used the phrase descendant of David when he described the gospel. So 2 Timothy 2 8, Paul says, remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David, this is my gospel, for which I'm suffering even to the point of being chained. This fullness of the gospel is so important to Paul, he's even willing to risk his life for it. Also in Romans chapter 1 verses 1 to 4, Paul describes himself, it's a servant of Jesus set a part for the gospel of God. And he tells him the gospel was promised beforehand through the prophets in the Holy Scriptures, and it's regarding God's Son,

who, as to his earthly life, was a descendant of David. Now, the reason we bring this up is because it was important to Paul to connect the gospel with Jesus' kingship. Paul wants us to understand that Jesus fulfills all of the Old Testament and that all hopes for deliverance

pointed to him and were fulfilled by him. Jesus is our Savior, but he is also our king who sits on the throne, securing our salvation because he intercedes on our behalf forever. Now, I don't know if any of you were engaged in the royal funeral this past year when Queen Elizabeth died, but in our time, she's about as close as we can get to understanding this idea of royalty. Maybe you've got an invite to her funeral.

I did not. Apparently, though, the security issue was a nightmare with all the dignitaries that were present. Now, one of the most fascinating things was how the world just kind of stopped during her funeral. Even the flights stopped. Now, can you imagine getting an invitation from the queen and not accepting? Or better yet, can you imagine accepting your invitation and then getting there and sitting on her throne? Well, of course now, we understand that we don't belong there, don't we?

Do we also understand how we do not belong on the throne of Jesus? There's no room for us there. It's a one-person seat. It's not a love seat where you and I sit beside Jesus and we get to decide who's in charge for the day. We don't just ask Jesus into our hearts. We submit, we surrender our whole life to Jesus because he is king.

So what does it look like for you to submit and surrender to King Jesus? Maybe there's an area of your life you've kept for yourself that you need to bring under his authority, that you need to surrender to his plan. Maybe you thought he wasn't powerful enough to save you from a sin you've struggled with, and you need to recognize his full authority over everything, even sin.

How are you going to honor Jesus as the king of your life? Before you forget, sign up for the brand new TMBT newsletter. Hit the link in the show notes, and you'll get an email every Wednesday. that will help you beat the midweek slump and go deeper in your walk with Jesus. Thanks for listening.