Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - The Reality of God’s Nearness | The Gospels | Matthew 1:18-25

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

What do you do with the sin you can’t seem to shake? Why do rules and principles never fully fix what’s broken in us? And how can we know God's nearness? In today’s episode, Tanya explores Matthew 1:18–25 and shows how Jesus meets us in our messy world to make us new from the inside out. Read the Bible with us! This year, we’re exploring the Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and it's never too late to join! Download your reading plan now. 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. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it so that 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. Passage: Matthew 1:18-25

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Tanya Wilmuth. This summer, I read a book called Marriage at Sea, and it's the true story of Maurice and Maryland, who were sailing the Pacific when their boat was struck by a harpooned whale and began to go down. So they had to escape into their dingy and their life raft without any electrical system on board their ship to alert the coast guard that the ship was sinking. They were in the middle of the Pacific. So what happened is they drifted for 118 days,

while seven ships cruised by never seeing them because their flares didn't work. Now, while they were on this dingy and life raft, they had a myriad of problems. They were anchored by the weight of Maurice's depression and his lack of desire to survive. Marilyn is the one that kept them alive. She was the one bucking water out of the life raft every hour. she was the one making sure they had turtle or fish meat to eat, and she was also journaling about the meals and adventures they would have when they were rescued. She had hope.

But after 118 days, the captain of a South Korean fishing vessel mercifully saw something blurry in the water. The ship had been at sea for two years, and the captain decided, even though they were all ready to get home to turn around and go look at that blur and find out what it was. And when he got there, he found two emissated, barely moving, bodies on a life raft. So the crew lifted Maurice and Maryland out of the raft and onto the ship, but their muscles were so deteriorated that they couldn't even stand up, let alone walk. They were crawling across the deck. The sores on Maurice's back went all the way to the bone. Their bodies

almost shut down after the rescue because they'd gotten so accustomed to bear survival that everything else had started to fail and it wasn't ready to be restarted again. Now the captain of the ship was kind and forward-thinking. He brought all the possessions onto the fishing vessel, the raft, the journal, the survival kit, and the cans of rainwater they'd saved to drink. He wanted to preserve their only belongings. But when those cans of water came on board, it was just too much. The smell of the ransomed raid water was so foul, it made everyone on the ship stick to their stomach. So they had to do something. At first, they dumped out the water and they tried to keep the cans. But when that didn't take care of the

smell, they had to throw those overboard too. If you have ever questioned whether or not you can truly change, I can relate. Because when I read this story about Marais and Maryland, I thought about that rancid water and the rusted cans that held it. It can be so discouraging to try to pour the water and still be left with the can. It can be so discouraging to watch the evil that exists in us come out of us and try to manage it. The things that we compare, the things that we say, the desires that we have, the addictions that keep us trapped, those are like the water that we try over and over to pour out of the cans. We can try to address these things the way the captain first addressed the water by dumping

it out and keeping the cans. But the danger of that approach is this. The external temptations that we face every day are made so much harder by the evil that exist inside us. None of us is yet completely pure, and sin just continues to keep us and hold us down. So that sounds really discouraging, doesn't it? Here is our dilemma, though. We are more pure than we were before the work of God's grace in our hearts. But that work is a lifelong process. And that work is taking place in a dramatically broken world, where the currents of the culture we live in make it easier to take the path of least resistance than to address the bigger problem.

Now, that does sound discouraging, but God does not leave us to deal with this on our own. The best news we have is that he broke through the evil and darkness with a dramatic gift of grace, his son, Jesus. So let's get biblical. That is exactly what we see in today's passage. Matthew 1 is evidence of God crashing into a broken world. On one hand, you have Joseph, confused and afraid after finding out that his fiancé Mary is pregnant, and planning to divorce her quietly so as not to bring exposure and threat to her. I can imagine the battle going on inside Joseph's mind, all the voices that he probably imagined hearing about what others would think, what this would mean for his future or for his family.

It's so tender, though, that God did not lead Joseph alone in this fear and confusion. Listen in from Matthew 1 verse 20 and 21 to what God did It says Joseph was troubled in heart And God sent an angel to him saying Joseph Son of David Don't be afraid to take Mary as your wife

Because what has been conceived in her Is from the Holy Spirit She will give birth to a son And you are to name him Jesus Because he will save his people from their sins God used his angel Not only to comfort Joseph But to show him a bigger picture

God was working through Mary to do something incredibly important for Joseph, for his family, and for every single one of us who fell from grace along with Adam in the Garden of Eden. Everything God had promised in the Old Testament was coming true. He was sending a Savior. He was sending a son, his son, to save people from their sins. God is not a distant Lord or a detached master. He is not impersonal and he never separates himself from right neediness. Instead, he invades our dark and messy world by giving us his son, by pouring out radical grace on people who didn't even recognize how much they needed him.

From where we started today, those cans of water kept Maurice and Maryland alive for a little while, but those were not a sustainable solution. Every drop of water that went in there was going to be contaminated. And that shows our dilemma as well, because we can't just manage evil. We need more than a cleanup. We need more than a set of rules and principles. We need to be made new from the inside out. Joseph's story shows us how God actually meets that need. He didn't hand Joseph a set of instructions to manage his fear and confusion.

He came near. That is the God we have, too. We're not left to comfort ourselves by denying the evil that we struggle with every day. And we're not left on our own strength to deal with it either. He gives us the best gift there is himself. because he knows that in him, we will find everything we need until this journey ends. So this week takes him time to recall and journal about the moments God has drawn near to you, both in the Bible and His Holy Spirit and speaking to you, but also just in practical ways in your own life.

And let that lead you into worship over His nearness. And let it be permission to release what you've been carrying on your own. We have up today because our God crashed through the darkness, Because our God is not distant. Our rest and our strength are found in the reality of His nearness.