Several years ago my father became interested in genealogy. He bought an account at ancestry.com and ended up tracing our family roots back to the 17th century in Scotland and England. He enjoyed sitting down with me at the computer and looking back at our ancestors and learning as much as we could about where they lived and how they ultimately settled in America. I was struck by how their stories were a part of my story, even though I had not been aware of them.
We all come from a family line of people who were shaped by where they lived and what they did. And we can learn more fully about the story of our lives by learning about the story of their lives.
The same is true of Jesus. Author Dan Wilt of Seedbed has written a daily Advent devotional that explores how we can more profoundly understand Jesus’ heart and mission by exploring the stories of people in Jesus’ family tree. Jesus is fully God, of course, yet he is also fully human, with ancestors and a family tree that is rooted in the land of Israel and the story of how God worked in and through them.
We’ll explore how Jesus, his mother Mary, and his adopted father Joseph all come from the family vine of the great King David, the son of Jesse. We’ll use as a map the idea known as a “Jesse Tree”, which is an an approach to the preparation season of Advent, leading us toward Christmas, that encourages us to revisit stories from the Old Testament to help us gain insights into the family line of Jesus and the spiritual mandate of the child born to save the world.
I look forward to exploring Jesus’ roots during this Advent season! If you would like to read along using Dan Wilt’s daily devotional, you can order the eBook from Amazon here, or directly from Seedbed here.
Grace and peace,
Clint