Hope in Messy Stories // A Story to Believe (Advent 2025) // Luke 1, Matthew 1, Romans 8 // 11.30.25 // Doug Glynn

In this first week of our Advent series, “A Story to Believe,” we looked at the surprising way the New Testament begins: with a genealogy. Matthew opens his Gospel by tracing Jesus’ family line through people we might be tempted to hide—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba. Their stories are messy, painful, marked by scandal, loss, and injustice. Yet Matthew highlights them on purpose. Their presence in Jesus’ family tree shows us that God does not airbrush the story; He tells the truth about the brokenness and then steps into it with grace.

We also explored how this genealogy reveals how God brings hope: not from a safe distance, but from the inside out. God doesn’t repair the human condition by sending a checklist or a technique. He draws near in Jesus, entering the very “bloodstream” of broken families and complicated lives. The same God who saw the fear of Abraham, the scandal around Tamar, the outsider status of Rahab and Ruth, the moral failure of David, and the trauma of Bathsheba is the God who sees our stories too—our regret, our shame, our wounds, our repeated patterns—and says, “I’m not afraid of this. I’m not offended by this. I will enter in and bring hope.”

From there we connected this to our own wrestling with hope. Many of us carry chapters we wish we could erase—things done to us, choices we made, family dynamics we’re not proud of. We challenged the common, fatalistic idea that “everything happens for a reason” in the sense that God caused every painful thing. Scripture paints a different picture: in a broken world, sin and evil are not God’s will, yet “in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28). God doesn’t cause all things, but He is always at work in all things, bringing redemption out of what was meant for harm.

Finally, we responded with a tangible act of trust. Drawing from Rahab’s red cord in the window—her sign of trust that God would rescue and redeem what she could not fix—we invited people to come forward and tie a small red ribbon onto a rope at the front of the room. Each ribbon represents a messy or painful part of a story being entrusted to Jesus. It’s a visual confession: “My story is not too messy for You. I’m tying my story into Yours. My hope is in You.” As those ribbons gather over Advent, they become a living picture of the good news: in Jesus, even our most complicated stories can become a story to believe… a story of hope.