Hope Blog

▶ 0:54:30

This was the Sunday between Christmas and New Year’s, which at Hope means
travel, thin volunteer rosters, and toddler classes but nothing above them. Matt welcomed the
room to children’s ministry — “you’ve all been deputized” — announced that the poinsettias were
free to a good home after the service, and promised to be on his best behavior, a promise he
later broke with a third Lord of the Rings reference.

A word about repayment

▶ 0:56:46

He started somewhere else entirely. There is a very human Christmas feeling, he said, of
wanting to come out at least even on gifts — the quiet discomfort of receiving generously from
someone you forgot to buy for. That instinct does not transfer to God. “There is never any time
in the future where we’ll pay off our low-interest or zero-interest loan to him,” Matt said.
“There’s no license plate making in heaven.” The gifts keep coming, because
in
his presence is fullness of joy. One of our biggest struggles with God is simply letting
him be better than us — and when you do, you get to know him as he really is.

1. Treasures from the east, promised centuries earlier

▶ 0:58:26

Matt read that against Isaiah’s vision of the nations streaming toward Israel’s light:

Read on and the correspondence gets uncomfortably specific — sons coming from afar,
daughters carried on the hip, camels from Midian and Ephah, and travelers from Sheba bringing
gold and frankincense (Isaiah
60:4–6). Two of the three gifts, named by the prophet. And behind Isaiah stands something
older still: the promise to Abraham that
in
his offspring all the nations of the earth would be blessed — made before Israel was a
nation, and being kept here by foreigners kneeling on a dirt floor.

▶ 1:02:01

Who were they? Not three, and probably not kings. “There’s no way of knowing how many they
were,” Matt said — the number three comes from the gifts, and the crowns come from the
scaffolding we build around the Bible rather than the Bible itself. The Greek is magoi,
the same word the Septuagint uses in
Daniel
2:2 for the enchanters Nebuchadnezzar summoned about his dream — a word that can mean
stargazer or astrologer, which fits men watching the night sky. Matt’s reconstruction: Daniel
served as a prophet in Babylon and Persia, and told those courts about
a
stone cut by no human hand that would supplant every kingdom on earth. Wise men in the east
kept that memory alive. When the star rose, they knew whose it was — and assumed, wrongly, that
Jerusalem would already be celebrating.

Instead a dream sent them home by another road. These pagan astrologers heard from God
accurately, through the sky and through their sleep. It breaks the mold of how we assume God is
permitted to speak, and he seems untroubled by the mold.

2. Joseph, and four dreams he could easily have shrugged off

▶ 1:04:43

Herod does what threatened rulers do; a new king is a problem for his line. And God’s
countermeasure is a dream. Matt pressed on how small that is: not fire, not a sign in the sky,
not an angel standing in the room while you are awake. “When you wake up in the morning and you
remember a dream, you think, well, it could have been supper.” Joseph heard, listened, obeyed —
by night, on a donkey, to a foreign country, with an open-ended instruction to stay until
further notice. It required faith precisely because the evidence was so thin.

▶ 1:07:02

Then the massacre — every male child in Bethlehem two years old and under, the age bracket
itself telling us how long the Magi’s journey took. Matthew reaches for Jeremiah rather than
explaining it away: a
voice heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they
are no more. Herod’s rage lands on the most vulnerable and innocent people available, and
goes unchecked. That is the darkness this story is fighting.

▶ 1:08:36

A third dream brings the family back after Herod dies; a fourth turns them aside to Galilee
when Archelaus proves no safer
(Matthew
2:19–23). Four times, the same unimpressive delivery method. Four times, a man gets up and
moves his family.

3. Jesus re-walking Israel’s road

▶ 1:09:20

“Out of Egypt I called my son” was first said about the nation
(Hosea
11:1), and Matthew hands it to the child. From there the pattern keeps repeating: Israel
came out of Egypt toward the land, and so does Jesus; Israel passed through the water, and Jesus
is baptized in the Jordan; Israel was tested forty years in the wilderness, and Jesus fasts and
is tempted there; Israel was called God’s servant, and Jesus is the true and faithful
suffering
servant. Moses promised
a
prophet like himself, and here he is. Bread appeared in the wilderness for Israel, and Jesus
hands out the same. Israel kept the Passover lamb; Jesus is the lamb. Israel received a
covenant through a mediator on a mountain; Jesus teaches the law and its significance on one.

“A true and profound fulfillment of the promises God has been giving,” Matt said — “but the
packaging looks small.” The robust thing arrives in the humility of a child.

▶ 1:12:59

Even Nazareth carries freight. No single verse says “he shall be called a Nazarene,” so Matt
offered two possibilities. Nazareth was a humble place to be from, and the prophets said the
Messiah would be humble. And Galilee itself was under prophetic expectation:

The other option is wordplay. Isaiah
11:1 promises a branch — netzer — from the stump of Jesse, and Hebrew runs on
consonants, which Nazareth shares. “It could be like a dad joke kind of prophecy.”

4. Count the forces on each side

▶ 1:14:24

Matt laid the ledger out. Herod: his own throne, backed by Rome and its resources.
Self-issued permission to deceive. Religious scholars summoned on command. Governmental
authority, soldiers, and the will and means to kill children in quantity, with nobody to stop
him. On the other side: one small poor family, guided by angels through dreams.

Could God have done it differently? “Could God have gone totally Lord of the Rings epic
battle mode?” A fire show, you shall not pass. Baby Jesus strangling snakes like
Hercules. A golden crib and a public guarantee of safety. Presumably yes. What he did instead
was speak to one man in a poor family, in his sleep — and that completely routed an opponent who
held every visible advantage.

5. Watch for the fingerprints

▶ 1:17:37

Which is where he turned it toward the room, on the last Sunday of the year. Many of us are
asking for the big rescue: the breakthrough, the giant check, the person who surfaces after
years to say they are sorry, Gandalf coming over the ridge at dawn. “It is in God’s track record
to overcome great evil with really, really small humble acts that, if you weren’t super paying
attention, you might even miss.” A scoffer looks at chaos on this scale and says: that’s it?
Dreams, to one poor family? Yes. And he wins through it.

▶ 1:19:17

Matt was careful about what he was not saying. Not: make a New Year’s resolution about baby
steps. What he asked for was attention — “look for the fingerprints of a humble God who might
move in small ways.” Have you ever been bent out of shape that the Lord didn’t do enough, fast
enough, big enough, loud enough, bright enough? Then notice what he is doing on the scale he
actually chose. We are people who ask for
daily
bread, dependent day by day. Reframed that way, the same circumstance produces gratitude
instead of grievance — and a sharper sense of how powerful he is, given how little of himself he
had to spend to win.

He closed by praying for eyes to see what God is in fact doing, for faith while we are
outnumbered, and for gratitude.

▶ 1:02:09

Matt opened a Christmas Sunday message by talking about the Sistine Chapel, which
he has never visited. Twelve prophet figures run from the doorway to the altar. Five are Old
Testament prophets. Five are sibyls — pagan oracles, Greek and Persian and Libyan — and the
medieval church put them on a church ceiling because the literature attributed to them seemed
to anticipate the birth of a king from Abraham’s line. “Some of them are so explicitly
Christian you’re like, oh my gosh, what is going on here.” He was careful: he is not calling
that scripture, and Christians may well have embellished it. But it raises the question the
whole message turns on.

Can God speak to pagans?

▶ 1:05:48

Numbers has a test case. Moab hires
Balaam,
a pagan prophet, to curse Israel, and he cannot manage it — he keeps blessing them instead,
telling the delegation that whatever the Lord says is what he will have to say. That is not the
same as loyalty. By
Numbers 25
and
31
Balaam has found another way to earn his fee, coaching the nations Israel was meant to displace
to intermarry strategically. He was never a double agent. God simply spoke through him.

Which is where the Nicene Creed’s line about the Spirit — that he “has spoken through the
prophets” — meets the word canon, a measuring rod. “Let’s say you’re reading C.S. Lewis
by the fire and you’re like, wow, he must have been inspired by God to write this,” Matt said.
You would still measure it by scripture. Whether or not God spoke to the sibyls, that is the
rule.

Who the Magi actually were

▶ 1:08:35

Pull it off the mantelpiece and away from the nativity set and it is genuinely strange. They
say they have come to worship — a word that can mean kneeling in homage or the real thing.
“From the east” is not a location, it is a direction, and there is a great deal of territory
east of Jerusalem.

▶ 1:09:57

The word itself is the thread. Magoi shows up in the Greek of
Daniel 2:2,
where a sleepless Nebuchadnezzar summons magicians, enchanters, sorcerers and Chaldeans. The
Hebrew behind “enchanters” can mean astronomer, stargazer. Then comes the impossible demand:
tell me the dream and its meaning, or be torn limb from limb and have your houses
leveled. “How about that,” Matt said. “You show up to work, that’s your assignment.”

▶ 1:13:58

Daniel — an exile from Judah, and a prophet — is swept into the same death sentence, and
goes to God. He describes the composite statue of gold, silver, bronze, iron and clay, and then
the interpretation:

The magician class of Babylon kept their necks that day, and Matt’s guess is that they never
forgot who saved them. Daniel rose in rank and stayed for decades.

What Daniel would have carried with him

▶ 1:15:54

Daniel came after Isaiah, and probably had a copy of him in exile:

Set the two side by side. A prophet holding a promise of a child whose government never ends
hands a Babylonian king a vision of a kingdom that smashes every other kingdom and stands
forever. The promises cohere — and they were deposited, by an exile, in a library and a living
memory in a city that happens to lie east of Jerusalem.

Is there a good way to look up?

▶ 1:18:19

Nearly everyone in the ancient world watched the sky — Mari’s cuneiform tablets are full of
it, and even synagogues had zodiac imagery in the floors. Matt granted the obvious objection
first. Horoscope astrology, where your birthday assigns your temperament and your luck, gets
less plausible with every billion people added to the planet, and it collapses good and evil
into a machine. Reject it.

Then Romans, where Paul asks whether the nations have really heard, and answers himself:
“Their
voice has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world” — which is a
quotation, and not from Isaiah.

▶ 1:20:09

“Their voice” is the Hebrew word for a line, and what follows a line across the night sky in
the ancient world is a celestial body. Caring what the heavens say is not a Babylonian import.
It is in our own tradition, and Paul treats it as witness God has already given to people who
have neither the scriptures nor a synagogue nearby.

▶ 1:21:27

So put yourself in the east. The Jews say God speaks through the sky. Daniel lived among us
not so long ago, brought our own king word of a coming kingdom without end, and carried Isaiah’s
promise of a child. When his star appears, of course we go — and of course Jerusalem will be
thrilled to see us, because they are waiting for him too.

Jerusalem was not thrilled

▶ 1:22:32

“When King Herod heard this he was disturbed, and all Jerusalem with him.” Matt noted the
pattern: the city is in an uproar at the
triumphal
entry too. Disturbing Jerusalem is a habit Jesus has had since birth. The chief priests and
teachers answer the question from
Micah,
quoted in
Matthew 2:6
— Bethlehem, and out of it a ruler who will shepherd Israel, the same tribe of Judah whose
scepter Jacob said would not depart
(Genesis 49:10).
Herod then meets the Magi secretly, pins down when the star appeared, and sends them off with
instructions to report back so that he too may come and worship. He never goes looking
himself.

▶ 1:24:56

They followed a star to a baby they had just met and worshiped him, trusting God was leading
them — and he was. Then a dream. “At this point I’m not even sure if they’re pagan, because
they’re worshiping Jesus.” Herod, meanwhile, is caught off guard and, Matt thinks, hates it.

Everyone in the story — Herod, the Magi, Matthew himself — assumes this is a legitimate way
God might speak. And what it establishes is that the Gentile nations were in the scope of
salvation from the start, not bolted on later by disciples: the promise to Abraham was always
that all nations would be blessed in his seed
(Galatians 3:8).

Does he still speak?

▶ 1:29:15

Matt thought that would be the easy question and then read from his own journal instead of
arguing it. If you are a Christian at all, you already know the answer:
his
sheep know his voice, the
Spirit
testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and
no
one comes unless the Father draws him. The live question is how restricted he is in what he
can say, and when, and how.

▶ 1:29:58

Two entries, both from 2006. In the first he was working at a community college, reading
about Elijah’s boldness between appointments, and felt convicted — not condemned. A colleague
was in a boot after foot surgery. He asked whether he could practice praying for healing, which
he admits was a clunky way to put it. First attempt: they both felt relaxed. Second and third:
she felt blood rush to her foot, a tingling, and said it felt weird, which he took as a reason
to keep going. Later she came back and told him the pain had eased. He wrote it down the same
day and had her read and sign it to confirm it was accurate. God lifted already-written words
off the page and aimed them at a Tuesday.

▶ 1:32:47

The second is a different kind. Outside a Starbucks with his friend Chris, talking with four
teenage girls, Chris said he thought God had told him one of them had had a nightmare two days
before and that God wanted to give her peace. She confirmed it. He then asked whether her neck
hurt. It did. She was healed and she received Christ, and Matt cannot remember which came
first. They could have simply told her about Jesus — that was the whole errand. But knowing
that God knew about her nightmares took a wall down.

Under scripture, and still free

▶ 1:35:03

The guardrail Matt keeps is firm. Nothing he ever feels God has put on his heart outranks
scripture; he submits it. If a stargazer turns up claiming God told him there were multiple
Christs, the answer is no, because that is not what scripture says. But the ultimate authority
is God himself and not the written word about him — which is precisely why he remains free to
speak.

And what is scripture’s own story? A living God who wants every tribe to know him
relationally, not a retired one who launched a mission and left us to finish it. If the
invitation is relationship, then his Spirit testifying to their spirit, his sheep knowing his
voice, is not a first-generation arrangement.

▶ 1:35:45

Can Jesus speak to pagans? To persecutors of the church — Paul was one? To his own enemies?
Directly, or through you, or indirectly through you? “Everything I know about God through the
Bible is that he feels permission to do however he pleases.”

He closed where the Magi ended up, on their knees. God spoke to them. He spoke to and through
Balaam. Maybe he spoke through the sibyls. What matters more on a Sunday before Christmas is
that he is speaking now — and to anyone not yet his, the thing he is most likely saying is to
lay your sins and burdens down at the cross and come.
Today
is the day of salvation.

▶ 1:12:46

“I do want to preach from the genealogy of Jesus. It’s not a joke.” Matt called it a privilege to dust off and polish the parts of scripture people find confusing, offensive or boring, and show them for the beautiful part of God’s overarching story that they are. The point of doing that, he said, is not literary appreciation. It is that people would read the Bible for themselves — and behind that, that they would know Jesus firsthand rather than secondhand.

Start at the pivot: Abraham

▶ 1:14:38

Before opening Matthew, Matt went back to the man the genealogy turns on.

Abram responded in faith while still in Ur of the Chaldeans, called out of his father’s household, carrying no covenants and no circumcision yet. He is, as Matt put it, a father to both the circumcised and the uncircumcised. The promise came again after the near-sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis 22:15–18): offspring like the stars and the sand, and “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed.” Matt read that as singular — one particular descendant — and pointed to Paul’s argument in Galatians for anyone who wanted to check him.

▶ 1:17:35

Then to Matthew 1:1–2 — and the structure gives itself away immediately. The opening line runs backward: Jesus, son of David, son of Abraham. Then it turns around and runs forward from Abraham down. “It pivots at Abraham,” Matt said, “which to me shows that Abraham is an important figure in Jesus’s genealogy.”

The lion out of Judah

▶ 1:18:49

The line to David runs through Judah, and Judah got a promise of his own — Jacob’s deathbed blessing over his sons.

Matt noted the timing problem that makes it obviously forward-looking: at that moment the powerful brother is Joseph, running Egypt, not Judah. So the blessing is aimed somewhere down the line. And the imagery that follows — a donkey’s colt bound to the vine, garments washed in wine, “his vesture in the blood of grapes” (Genesis 49:11–12) — gets picked up again in Isaiah 63, where a figure comes from Edom in red apparel, mighty to save, having trodden the winepress alone because there was no one to help, and again in Revelation 19. The Lion of Judah is not a worship-song flourish. It goes back a long way.

Tamar, and a story nobody would invent

▶ 1:22:46

Matthew did not have to write “Judah the father of Perez and Zerah by Tamar.” Luke’s genealogy names no women at all. Matthew names her — so Matt told the story from Genesis 38, promising to church it up a little, then apologizing to the Lord for the offer.

Judah’s eldest son married Tamar and died. The second refused to raise up an heir for her and died too. Judah told her to go live with her father until the youngest was old enough — and then never made good on it. Her own father was providing for her; Judah’s family was not. So when Judah traveled to shear sheep, she sat by the road dressed as a prostitute and intercepted him, taking his personal effects as collateral. Months later, told she was pregnant, Judah wanted her burned — until she produced his own seal and staff. His answer was as close to repentance as the chapter gets: she is more righteous than I. The twins from that night are Jesus’ ancestors.

Rahab and Ruth

▶ 1:27:40

Two more women cluster around Boaz. Matt allowed that scholars split on whether the Rahab named in Matthew 1:5 is the Rahab of Jericho or a different woman, and said the likelier reading is that Matthew is skipping generations here just as he did in verse one — and means the Rahab we know.

She was a prostitute living in the city wall who hid Israel’s spies, lied to her own people to protect them, and asked for mercy for her whole household (Joshua 2:8–13). Her confession was better theology than most of Israel’s at the time: “the LORD your God, he is God in the heavens above and on the earth beneath.” She let them out her window and tied a scarlet cord in it.

Ruth is the other — a Moabite widow who refused to go back to her people when released to (Ruth 1:16). Matt recommended reading the whole book; it is short.

“By the wife of Uriah”

▶ 1:30:36

The fourth flag is the strangest, because Matthew declines to use her name. Not “by Bathsheba.” Not even “David the king and Solomon the king.” Instead: “David was the father of Solomon by the wife of Uriah.” Matt’s read is that Matthew is deliberately leaving stories sticking out like a sore thumb, and this one points at David, not at her.

David saw, desired and took — the same three verbs as the garden, with the same fruit: death and chaos. Uriah was too honorable to sleep in his own house while his brothers were in the field, which made him inconvenient, so David had him killed to cover his tracks and then took his widow. That is Solomon’s mother. And it is to this same David that God says:

Solomon builds the temple. But “forever” outruns Solomon, and the man being promised it here is Jesus’ ancestor many times over.

Manasseh, and the rest of the list

▶ 1:34:24

Matthew keeps going, and Matt let the names carry their own weight: Hezekiah, who led quite a renewal movement, fathering Manasseh, who led quite a counter-movement. Fifty-five years of religious terror in Jerusalem — pagan altars inside the house of God, Baal, Asherah, the host of heaven, fortune tellers and mediums, and his own son burned as an offering (2 Kings 21:1–6). The line runs on through the deportation to Babylon “because of their unfaithfulness,” through Zerubbabel the governor, down to Joseph the husband of Mary (Matthew 1:11–16).

“If God had like this ew, yuck disgust response to humans,” Matt said, “you would have expected him to have gone through a different lineage.”

What the four women actually mark

▶ 1:40:06

Matt worked through the usual explanations and found them wanting. That the women represent our sinfulness? Manasseh does that far more efficiently, and with Uriah’s wife the blame plainly lies with David. That they were assertive women who sought Israel’s God when they did not have to? True of Ruth and Rahab, not of her. That they were all Gentiles? Possibly not all of them. And there are five women, not four, once you count Mary.

His answer was to look at where the flags land rather than at what the women have in common. Tamar marks Judah. Rahab and Ruth cluster around Boaz, David’s great-grandfather. Mary marks Jesus. Judah and David are the two men in this list who were handed an unearned, everlasting promise — the scepter that would not depart, the throne established forever. The flags are Matthew nudging the reader: check this out. Remember Judah. Remember David.

And Abraham is the pivot for the same reason, one size larger. This was never Israel first with the nations tacked on later; Abraham inherited the promise long before any of these men were born, and it was always about all the families of the earth.

Why we needed a plan that big

▶ 1:41:53

Matt reached for an odd illustration and it landed. In December 1986, and again in 1987, groups gathered at what they considered special sites — tens of thousands of people — convinced that if enough of them released enough positive energy and performed the right rituals, war and ethnic strife and national boundaries would give way to humanity’s true loving nature. “I guess it didn’t work,” he said.

“There’s something more wrong with us than they were mean to me and that made me mean. There is something more deeply wrong with us than I didn’t have quite all the advantages I needed growing up.” Sin is not a deficit you can scrub out, discipline away, or wall off behind good habits. Which is why the answer had to come from outside us — and did, in a genealogy full of people exactly like us.

So run to the rock

▶ 1:43:13

Matt’s invitation used Jesus’ own image: the one who falls on this stone will be broken, but better that than to have it fall on him (Matthew 21:44). Fall on the rock. Take refuge in him the way Rahab ran to the God of Israel from inside the wall of a doomed city.

Three things he said this genealogy taught him. No person, family or family line is too far gone or too disgusting for Jesus to involve himself in. Jesus’ perfection is not established by a perfect human lineage but by the fact that he is eternally God the Son. And God’s timing is long and multigenerational, which is precisely why we should have hope for the lost, the broken and the supposedly too-far-gone.

▶ 1:45:14

He closed with the objection he has heard from people more than once — this is for my kids, my relatives, the good people; I’m already too far gone. “No. This is for you. This is for you.” Especially, he said, when you are feeling confused, insecure, broken, creepy — let me introduce you to some people in Jesus’ lineage. By faith in the God of Israel you qualify for an inheritance with the saints, and the love of God is shed abroad in your heart. Don’t think of him as somebody else’s Lord. Go to him yourself.

▶ 1:04:06

Matt opened on the second Sunday of Advent with the church Christmas party, a
neighbor’s unexpected tin of cookies, and the observation that Christmas is, globally, a month-long
party where we celebrate someone’s birthday by giving gifts to each other. “It’s a grandpa vibe,” he
said — the kind of thing a generous person does. Then he said it was relevant to the sermon, and it
turned out to be.

The challenge, still standing

▶ 1:07:14

For five or six weeks Matt has been asking the same thing of the congregation, since the messages on
Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman: ask the Lord where he would have you walk in obedience, and make it
a real, tangible goal rather than an impossible one. He acknowledged the risk of annoying people by
repeating it, and judged the risk worth taking.

The reason he keeps pressing is that we tend to hear obedience as a cost. “Let’s say you drink too
much and the Lord helps you let go of that — you win.” Unforgiveness, likewise. On the human plane you
are the chief beneficiary every time.

▶ 1:09:56

For fuel he read what he called a pre-sermon sermon, from a chapter that is personally special to
him:

Maybe the prompting is to stir up a gift that has gone dormant, or to serve more zealously, or to
take up something new. He read on through
Romans 12:9–13
and stopped twice. First: “let love be genuine, abhor what is evil.” A genuinely loving person hates
things — the notion that love has no capacity for revulsion is simply not in the text. Second: “outdo
one another in showing honor.” You are permitted to be competitive here. Be creative with it.

Do not be haughty — associate with the lowly

▶ 1:14:51

Matt admitted he had to look up haughty — it means exalted, lofty, high in an arrogant way
— and noticed that Paul pairs it with a command, not a mood. The way you stop being haughty is that you
go and associate with the lowly. Lowly by class, wealth, beauty, education, age; whatever the things are
that people prize and you do not see in the person in front of you. Disdain can run in either direction —
you can look down on the rich, the pretty, the ivory tower — but Paul’s plain intention is the poor and
the powerless.

▶ 1:15:26

Self-exaltation, he said, is ugly to God. It is natural to us, especially when we are insecure, and
that does not make it less abhorrent. God
gives grace to the
humble but opposes the proud — and as spiritual warfare goes, there is no opponent stronger than the
Lord himself. But God does not ask us for anything he is unwilling to do. Which is where Advent comes in.

A word for Joseph

▶ 1:16:36

Before the manger, a detour Matt said he had never taken in an Advent sermon: the humility required
of Joseph. First the refusal — this is too weird. Then angelic help, and reluctant consent. Then the
daily strangeness of it. “If this is God’s son, do I spank him?” The friends asking, twenty years on,
whether he is still sure. The seasons when you cannot pay the bills and the wise men’s gold is long
gone. To take on the responsibility for a son who is not yours, in a situation that could only wound
your pride.

Philippians 2 — the mind that is yours in Christ

▶ 1:18:05

Selfish ambition is instinctive, Matt said, and we look after our own interests with a vigilance that
is genuinely meticulous. Imagine spending that much care on the people around you.

▶ 1:20:55

He offered a reason to take the invitation personally even if you feel exempt from it. The
Dunning–Kruger effect: he had been watching a karate instructor on YouTube stop men in Central Park and
ask how they would do in a fight, and the ones with no training at all were the most confident. Matt’s
own years of martial arts have mostly taught him that he is weaker than he assumed, his reflexes are
bad, and he drops his hands — one instructor took to carrying a pool noodle to slap him in the head. If
that is how self-assessment works generally, then the people who most need to humble themselves before
God are exactly the ones most likely to decide this topic does not apply to them.

▶ 1:21:43

Two things Matt wanted the room to hold precisely. First, the parallel: the same word carries “form
of God” and “form of a servant.” As fully as he took on humanity, he is God — this is not a Trinity
where the least divine member gets sent on the errands. Second, “a thing to be grasped” is a Greek idiom
for an advantage you genuinely possess and could exploit. Paul is not saying Jesus modestly declined to
claim deity. He is saying Jesus, knowing exactly who he was, would not use it for himself.

And “emptied himself” holds no mystery, because Paul finishes the sentence. He emptied himself by
becoming a servant and obeying to the point of a cross. He did not stop being God. He started in utero —
he could have arrived as a baby and did not; he could have appeared full-grown and did not. Nursed,
washed, carried, dependent on a teenage girl in the ancient Near East with, as Matt put it, the medical
technology of camping.

▶ 1:24:38

Insane reward for insane humility — and Paul offers it as a pattern the Philippians are meant to fit
into. The letter is full of the same shape: Paul, who could have made a legal case to get out of prison
and did not; Timothy, not obliged to serve Paul as a son serves a father and doing it anyway;
Epaphroditus, who could have excused himself from the risk. In each case a real right, voluntarily not
exploited.

Whose knee, exactly

▶ 1:27:49

Matt sent the room back a few centuries for the source of that line:

There is one God, and to him every knee will bow. Paul, urging a church toward humility, quotes it
and says: that is about Jesus. The one with every power and right and privilege you could imagine is
born a baby among us. A literal baby.

Made like his brothers in every respect

▶ 1:29:16

“In every respect” is not merely a body, Matt said, because you are not merely a body. A human mind,
a human will, the human capacity to suffer and be tempted.

▶ 1:30:33

Being human is not the problem

▶ 1:31:15

If he was a hundred percent human and had no sin, then being human is not in itself sinful. Matt
named an instinct he thinks many of us carry — that our creatureliness is embarrassing, that needing to
eat and sleep and nap and be helped is somehow shameful. There is nothing wrong with being a person, and
God is not disgusted with you for it.

Sin is the difference, and he would not soften it: our acts, words and thoughts that rebel against
God’s will, or the negligence by which we avoid it. It twists the dignity of being made in God’s image.
We have all been pierced by it and we have all picked it up to strike others with. It is corrosive, we
cannot manage it ourselves, and its just wage is death —
“but the free gift of
God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

The invitation worth exploiting

▶ 1:36:11

Humility runs underneath most of what we call growth. Repentance requires it, because repentance is
admitting you were wrong. Maturity requires it, because deciding to grow up is a way of saying you are
not grown yet. Associating with the lowly requires it — and Matt pointed out that when Jesus associated
with the lowly, the lowly were us. Picture an office that is a throne room ringed by majestic creatures
of unknown power, and then deciding to take up residence on earth among these small people. Done in
admiration, imitating him, our own humility becomes a form of worship.

It also takes humility to come to him at all — to admit you are sick and dying in your sin and to
submit to a savior. Matt ended on how that arrival is received:

“Speaking of advantages that we can exploit,” Matt said, “let’s exploit this invitation.” His closing
prayer asked for one thing: that each person would find the place where they can drop their death and
get life instead.

▶ 0:57:46

Matt opened with a photograph he admitted he had no business taking. Hope has
built a friendship with an orthodox synagogue in town, and when their rabbi came here to preach
from Genesis, Matt went back with a large delegation to Rabbi Dan’s congregation. Standing in
the man’s pulpit, he quietly photographed the inside of it — stacks of papers, exactly like his
own. “I asked him how often do you clean this out.”

Where the Gospel of John series has been

▶ 0:59:30

Hope is midway through a series on John, and Matt paused it for the first Sunday of Advent.
He recapped the questions he has been leaving with the congregation, each of them a standing
offer to trade answers with him. From
Nicodemus,
who moved from confusion to wrestling to carrying Jesus’ body for burial: in what darkness could
you turn and walk in the light. From
the
Samaritan woman, whom Jesus honored with a long conversation and also pinpointed exactly
where she was struggling: where would Jesus poke you — not aggression, but an invitation into
deeper relationship. And from the message on glory: where could you walk in honor by obeying
even when it costs you something.

Commitment is the Advent version of that same question, “because we see God’s commitment to
us in Christ’s Incarnation.”

1. The scroll burning at Ephesus

▶ 1:02:18

Acts 19 has the sons of a Jewish high priest trying to invoke the name of Jesus without
belonging to him, and being overpowered for it. Jesus’ reputation is rising in Ephesus, and part
of that reputation is that his name carries weight and cannot be used as a tool.

▶ 1:04:50

Matt walked the escalation one step at a time. They were already believers. They came
physically forward and identified themselves with the movement. Their confession was public, not
private. They named the shameful things by name. And then they went further and destroyed the
books. These were not paperbacks from a half-price shop in Ephesus — hand-copied manuscripts,
perhaps five of a kind in the whole city, expensive precisely because they had cost years to
collect. There was no buyback program and nothing set aside to be quietly retrieved later. Matt
Googled the sum: millions of dollars, set on fire.

2. The widow who would not stop coming

▶ 1:06:18

Matt enjoyed the judge as comedy — “who would actually say this about themselves?” — and then
made the man’s motive precise. He is not annoyed the way you are annoyed when someone pricks your
conscience about a debt you owe. His conscience is not involved. He just wants her gone.

▶ 1:09:36

Then the pivot: “And
will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? … Nevertheless, when the Son
of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” That closing question is not a change of subject.
Luke told us the point before the parable started — that they ought always to pray and not lose
heart (Luke
18:1). So the faith the Son of Man is looking for is the widow’s: prayer that keeps involving
and invoking the Father in everything, past the point where you start to wonder whether it is too
much.

3. Count the cost — Jesus is not a garnish

▶ 1:11:45

The shock is an idiom, and it cannot mean disdain for your family — the same Lord teaches us
to love our neighbor and honor father and mother. Verse 27 supplies the meaning: our commitment to
Christ stands above every other commitment, and we follow him bearing a cross. Matt pressed on the
image. What do you do on a cross? This is not a tea party. You die on it.

▶ 1:15:30

The two parables that follow are the application. The man planning a tower sits down first and
counts whether he can finish, because a half-built tower invites mockery. The king with ten
thousand deliberates before meeting twenty thousand, and if the numbers are bad he sends for terms
of peace while the enemy is still far off
(Luke
14:28–32). Then the conclusion: “any
one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” Why start a tower you
cannot finish? Why go to war you will probably lose? “So why be kind of a disciple of Jesus?”

Matt did not exempt himself. “These words prick against me, but of course that doesn’t make
them not true.” The sharpness is not meant to poke at us and stop there; it is meant to go
through.

4. Now turn the texts around and look at God

▶ 1:19:56

This was the hinge of the message, and the reason it belongs to Advent. Everything the texts
say about what God expects is also a disclosure of what God is like. From his perspective,
persistence is prized. From his perspective, you do not start what you cannot finish. So does he
ask us to be something he is not willing to be himself? Do we imagine he is asking us, in any
category of life, to be better than he is?

▶ 1:21:20

Which makes these texts, as Matt put it, very Christmassy. The Incarnation was not a trial run.
It was not “I’ll embrace humanity and see how it goes, and if it turns out to be too difficult
there’s always the angels.” God the Son became man and to this day in the Trinity is man. He will
never undo it. That is how committed he is.

Why be confident that the worldwide body of Christ will be saved, cleaned and made glorious —
or that God intends to keep blessing Hope Chapel? Matt offered the deliberately dumb multiple
choice: because we have evolved to a higher level of religious skill and earned it? No. Because
that is who he is.

5. He is not shocked by your weakness

▶ 1:25:48

Try to picture God blindsided by your failure — panicking, saying he has never seen this
before. Did he not see the end from the beginning when he pursued you?

Matt guessed out loud that in a room this size, some are discouraged — remembering a golden age
of journaling and morning Bible reading and visible fruit, and feeling now like they have let God
down too many times to be wanted. Back burner, if he ever gets around to it. But if God values
persistence enough to hold up an annoying widow as the model, why would we assume he is not
persistent with us? Imagine Jesus saying the church is harder than he thought and he is tired.

6. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me”

▶ 1:29:08

Back to John, and the scene from the message two weeks earlier. The disciples urge him to eat.

Matt admitted he was taking a liberty with the phrasing, then took it: Jesus is nourished by
accomplishing his Father’s mission. He lives for this. The alternative we quietly assume is that
he is persistent out of obligation — he already bought us, so he takes the trash out again, the
way we handle chores we have no regard for. But Jesus is better than we are. We are not going to
deplete him, so that by the time this generation comes around he is out of patience.

▶ 1:31:42

“God actually wants to be generous to you.” Our generosity is often followed by regret, and
when someone annoys us we stop returning the call. His is not like that. To the person who feels
like damaged goods and wonders whether he wants them back — he lives for this.

7. So why commit, knowing we will fail

▶ 1:33:06

We start things and abandon them constantly — books, chores, friendships, more books. He does
not. He went out of his way to tell us to count the cost first so that we would not quit halfway,
and he is not about to do to us what he warned us against: get partway through a life and decide
it was harder than he expected. He could have come to earth to visit, point out all the dumb
things we are doing, explain how to live better, and leave. Instead he came to invite us to
the
marriage supper of the Lamb, and he would very much like us to be there.

The invitation is not to be somewhat committed. It goes all the way to his death, and it is
answered by a commitment that goes all the way to ours. Matt closed by praying that the Holy
Spirit would enable the church to find satisfaction and joy in God, and to follow, know, love, and
walk in his ways.