The King from Nowhere—Matthew 2
The English language is full of ways of saying that someone comes from an unimportant place. He's from the sticks. The boonies. Some podunk down. The hood. The ghetto. The middle of nowhere. In western North Carolina, where I grew up, there is a country town called Swannanoa. People sometimes called it Swannanowhere.
Jesus was from such a nowhere. But what I want to show you from Matthew 2 is that Jesus, the King from nowhere, brings joy to a weeping world.
The Over-Promiser, the Sluggard, the Troublemaker, and the Savior—Proverbs 6:1-19
Jesus Christ saves sinners from what we've done, from who we are, and from what we might become.
Do you ever look back on your past and wince when you think of something you really shouldn't have done? In my early twenties, I had a hard time finding dress shirts that fit me. But I found a website where you could plug in your measurements and they would send you a custom-tailored shirt. And it wasn't very expensive, if you picked the fabrics they had on sale. It was a great thing, in theory. The main problem was that the on-sale fabrics were all very, very bright fluorescent neon colors. I wore them anyway. I had a neon green and a neon orange. My middle school students loved it. They told me they could see me from a long way away. I was dating my future wife at the time. When I told a fellow teacher that I would soon be meeting Amy's parents, her immediate response was, "Don't wear that shirt."
Sometimes it's easy to reverse the effects of our folly. I eventually got rid of the neon shirts, and I don't think anyone was hurt by my actions. But sometimes it isn't so easy.
And what if the problem isn't what you've done, but who you are?