Redemption: It Does a Body Good!

Do you have baggage? We all do I guess just some of us have much more than others. Some of our baggage is stuff we have placed on ourselves through bad decisions and some of our baggage has been placed on us from the terrible things we have had to endure. Wherever it comes from there comes a time to put it down and move on. Now I am not implying that we can just up and forget the mistakes that we have made and I know you can’t just up and forget the hurts that people have caused you. However, we can do something about the baggage that freezes us. Some people deal with regrets and pain so much that they can’t move forward with their lives.

That is not what God wants for our lives. The point of Jesus Christ coming to this Earth was to redeem us from our sins and also redeem us from the pains of our past. He came to remake you so that you could move past all of the garbage. Speaking of Jesus and his coming to Earth lets look at a small portion of his genealogy that is mentioned in the book of Matthew. I am going to just mention a few names to get to the point.

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, & Mary

Some of them you remember their stories well others you do not easily recognize. Here are some of the things we know about them from the Old Testament and the beginning of the New Testament. One pretended to be a prostitute, one was a prostitute, two were childless widows for part of their lives, one was the center of David’s adultery tale which included her husband being killed, and then an unmarried teenage girl. This is what Jared Wilson calls the desperate housewives meets lifetime movie channel portion of Jesus’ genealogy. (For a deeper and much clearer look at these stories, you can take a look at Jared C. Wilson’s Your Jesus is too safe chapter on redemption. I credit him with much of the inspiration for this blog post)

Why would Matthew include these women with all this baggage? Maybe it was intended to show that even through our own mistakes and the terrible things that we have gone through, God is able to create something beautiful. God was able to take these women who had a lot of stuff in their lives, and turn their story into the beautiful story of the coming of Christ. He used their baggage to change the world. And if God can use these women and all their baggage he can certainly use us too. We just have to be willing to set it down. Don’t be held back by your past. Paul says in Philippians 3:13 “But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.”

I am including a video on redemption. It has a song by Jeremy Riddle. Watch the video and read the words the first time through, but it is also good to just go back and just listen to the song without reading the screen.
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